wigstheone
Aug 13, 01, 11:19 am
New York Magazine, 8/13/01
On a frigid winter evening not long ago, a few thousand feet above Queens, the pilot of a US Airways 737 was coming in for a landing at La Guardia Airport. He was seven and a half seconds away from the tarmac -- wheels out, lights on, all clear -- when along came the unthinkable. Out of the darkness, he spotted the American Airlines logo closing in from the right, getting bigger and bigger. When you're this close to the ground and you see something you don't want to see -- like another airplane heading for you -- tapping the brakes is not an option. The two planes missed, but not by much. A few hundred feet. Seconds. "Close call, huh?" the pilot said to the tower. "What's going on?" Which is just what the guys in the tower were thinking. "I'm not sure," the air-traffic controller said. "He just took the shot, and . . . whew! It was a slow roller, sir." An uncomfortable silence followed -- until the controller decided to try a little gallows humor. "What color were his eyes?"
That was January 23, 1998, at 6:19 p.m. Three months later, practically the same thing happened -- with just twenty feet of wiggle room -- apparently because of a spilled cup of coffee in the control tower. It happened eight months after that, too, during a light rain -- and it happened again twice last year, the worst year ever for La Guardia air traffic.
It keeps happening because at La Guardia, the world's busiest small airport, runway choreography is timed for maximum efficiency; arriving and departing planes are only seconds apart. The hurdle is La Guardia's famously outdated, short, intersecting runways, surrounded mostly by water and tormented by low-slung clouds. For more than a year now, the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated some of these near-tragedies, has urged the airport to space its takeoffs and landings further apart. They want to slow things down.
But the Federal Aviation Administration -- which has the right to disregard NTSB recommendations, and has thousands of planes to push through New York each day -- doesn't want things slowed down. Neither do the airlines, which have enough trouble getting in and out of La Guardia on time. And neither -- let's face it -- do many passengers, who've been groaning about delays for years. "This safety recommendation would unnecessarily impact the National Airspace System," the FAA replied to the NTSB in a memo last September. "Departure slots would be lost."
Last fall, after yet another close shave, an exasperated 757 pilot had enough. "After 34 years flying in and out of La Guardia, I now feel La Guardia has become a dangerous airport," he wrote in a complaint to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, an anonymous whistle-blower service. "Approach, tower, and controllers are stressed to the max. Air-Traffic Control is trying to stuff too many aircraft into too small an airport. I strongly feel La Guardia is an accident waiting to happen."
It had to happen sometime. After years of more and more flights and longer waits, we've finally hit critical mass. What was once a punctuality problem is now a safety problem -- not just at La Guardia, the heavyweight champ of delays, but also at JFK and Newark. The fates of all three are linked by the logjammed airspace they share.
Since 1996, New York air traffic has increased by a third, but the number of operational errors -- FAA jargon for controller slipups -- has jumped by 61 percent. Operational deviations, the label for slightly less life-threatening mistakes, have almost doubled. This year, New York controllers will screw up at least 70 times. And that's if we're lucky. "It's not because the controllers aren't good," says Mary Fackler Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation inspector general. "It's because they've been overworked."
Things aren't that much safer on the ground. As the number of scheduled flights increases, the risk of two planes' ramming into each other on a crowded runway jumps exponentially. This year -- again, if we're lucky -- JFK, La Guardia, and Newark will all weather four ground incursions, the FAA's term for close shaves on the tarmac. "Our study of close calls -- and La Guardia certainly has its share of those -- showed that when traffic doubles, the risks don't double; they quadruple," says Arnold Barnett, a statistician from MIT's Sloan School, who studied the risk of future collisions at the FAA's request.
How things got this bad is obvious -- too many planes trying to land on too few runways. Obsolete almost since the day it opened, pint-size La Guardia is now a punch line, like the Van Wyck. But what's not widely acknowledged is how, as the system frantically spends more dollars to fight delays, other equally vital functions get shortchanged. Ramp crews are pushed to cut their flight-turnaround times in half and prepare substitute planes faster. Flight dispatchers -- who are also responsible for signing off on safety regulations -- spend more time hastily recalibrating routes, and less on each individual plane. "Airline profitability is directly dependent on the amount of time they spend in the air and not waiting on the runway," says one Washington lawyer who works for the airlines. The whole culture of aviation is geared toward working the problem instead of fixing it.
New technology can ease the burden -- when, or if, we get any. Every decent-size boat on the Sound has a global-positioning system, but U.S. jets still don't. The FAA has yet to install a crucial radar technology to protect JFK and La Guardia from wind shear, the freak gusts that slap planes out of the sky (though every other major airport has it). Much of the air-traffic-control world still seems to be experiencing aviation in a Cold War context. The primary communication link between the La Guardia tower and the air-traffic command center in Washington is a black rotary-dial telephone. When I ask Leo Prusak, the control tower's traffic manager, if he needs better equipment, he's too busy working the problem to think about it. "I don't even know," he says. "I mean, we don't spend our day in that realm."
The safety gap extends to security against guns and explosives. Everyone from the FAA to the FBI acknowledges that New York is still a top terrorism target, but bomb-detection methods are lagging. Checked luggage on domestic flights is hardly ever scanned by metal detectors. In 1998, Congress mandated the installation of a new device for sensing explosive chemicals in baggage -- a response to the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, ten years earlier. Today, it's at more than 100 airports nationally, but fewer than a half-dozen machines serve all of JFK. And at every New York airport, the guards who handle the metal detectors and protect the gates -- hired by companies contracted by each airline -- receive minimal training and rarely make more than $7 an hour. "The fact is, the airline industry puts its money where its priorities are," says Bill McGee, a former flight dispatcher who covers the industry as editor of Consumer Reports Travel Letter. "We're basically getting what we pay for."
Even when the FAA can step in, it has problems dictating policy -- especially to the dozens of foreign airlines flying into New York. "It's an undeniable fact that there are two sets of rules in place, and the rules for foreign carriers are less stringent," McGee says. The results can be dreadful: In 1990, an Avianca flight from Colombia crashed over Long Island because the pilot used the wrong English phrase to say he was low on fuel. The descent and crash of Egypt Air 990 after liftoff from JFK two years ago was prompted, according to the NTSB, by a mentally unstable co-pilot who might have been screened out if he'd been subject to FAA-mandated medical testing.
But even if everyone follows the rules, the skies keep getting more crowded. The FAA projects that over the next decade, demand for flights at La Guardia will increase by 17 percent, or about 200 takeoffs and landings day -- which is a bit of a shock to the Port Authority, which manages the airport and says it's physically impossible. Newark is expected to rise by even more -- another fantasy scenario, according to the Port Authority. "You're looking at more planes in a smaller space, so you're eroding the margin of safety," says Bob Ober, a pilot who serves on the Air Traffic Procedure Advisory Committee, an interagency panel chartered by Congress. "We're hoping we don't have any system failures with radar and communication and planning. The idea here is, when these systems fail, will the redundancy programs be enough? We're pushing the envelope here with everything."
Last year, Congress deregulated flights at La Guardia, leading to a near-complete shutdown of the airport. The FAA, airlines, and Port Authority restored the status quo by agreeing to a provisional cap on takeoffs and landings without resolving the underlying problem. And the commercial-airline industry, with the second-largest lobby in Washington next to Big Tobacco, has just one response: Expand. Grow your way out of the problem.
"Increasing capacity is the only appropriate response to the public's needs," said Edward Merlis, a lobbyist with the Air Transport Association, at a Senate hearing in March, "and, in the long run, the only response that the public will accept."
The FAA's regional air-traffic-control center -- the tracon, for short -- is an unmarked white stucco building just off the Meadowbrook Parkway in Garden City, Long Island. Inside is a vast, shadowy amphitheater filled with controllers spinning track balls, their faces illuminated by the glow of computer monitors. A decade ago, the tracon employed 90 controllers; now there are 265. Their job is to keep tabs on every plane within 100 nautical miles (115 regular miles). They're the ones pilots talk to when they're just beyond the reach of an airport control tower. Planes farther out are handled by controllers at the New York Center in Ronkonkoma, Long Island.
The vibe is decidedly low-tech: The computer screens look like a networked game of Airplane Asteroids. The object of the game is to stop blips from hitting each other. And they're good at it, too: Operational errors have gone down in the past five years, while they've gone up 61 percent at Ronkonkoma.
It seems I've picked a bad time to stop by the tracon. "Please don't tape me -- we are very busy!" shouts a controller in the middle of the amphitheater. The problem today, I learn, is cloud cover over one of La Guardia's runways, a few miles away. This runway runs parallel to runways at Newark and Kennedy, so the controllers can usually work the problem by guiding planes in and out like preschoolers, in straight, orderly lines. But today, La Guardia has had to switch over to Runway 13 -- the other runway, the one that goes in precisely the wrong direction, northwest to southeast. And that's thrown everybody at the tracon into a tizzy. Everybody hates Runway 13.
To find the right angle to land, planes are backed up over Connecticut and New Jersey, routed in loops as wide as some counties. Gridlock starts spreading like an epidemic. Any pilot trying to get in or out of Newark, Kennedy, and Teterboro is being told to take a number.
"It's our absolute worst operation for efficiency, and you happened to hit it," says Phil Barbarello, the fifteen-year veteran tracon controller who is showing me around. "This happens about a half-dozen times a year."
The entire airspace over New York City has just been shut down because of an April shower.
In general, though, the days of planes stacked up like pancakes over an airport are behind us, says Frank Hatfield, an ex-Navy man and a former air-traffic controller with a bushy white mustache who moved here from Virginia four years ago to be the FAA's airspace czar. It's a policy change that he's proud of: Rather than let a plane take off for an airport that's experiencing delays or expecting a storm, a flight dispatcher will simply keep that plane on the ground.
But something else has changed, too, Hatfield says -- the pressure. At La Guardia, air traffic used to come and go in spurts. Now the pace is unrelenting. "Generally, there were periods in the day, you know, between 11 and 11:45, where there was gonna be a lull here at the airport -- so the controller can breathe in, breathe out, and just sit back and do a little mental refreshment while waiting for the next big rush," he says in his drawl. "Now you walk in and you strap on a headset and you don't stop until you take that headset off. And it doesn't matter what time you go in and do it. There are no lulls anymore."
Planes can only enter and exit New York's airspace through eight "gates" in the sky -- four to the north and four to the south. Add to that the fact that the busiest domestic routes in the U.S., maybe the world, are the New York- Boston and New York-Washington shuttles. "Each day, all the airports are competing to get planes through them," Hatfield says. "These guys in New York -- the traffic is all climbing, diving, swerving, to get in and out of the busiest airspace on the face of the earth. Worldwide, New York is the challenge."
Hatfield pauses for effect. "And you would ask, well, how come this airspace is so screwed up? Simple answer: When this airspace was designed back in the 1960s, we didn't have this many airplanes. We're trying to run millennium traffic on crap that was designed 40 years ago, and that just don't cut it."
More of the article is available at http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5068&position=1
On a frigid winter evening not long ago, a few thousand feet above Queens, the pilot of a US Airways 737 was coming in for a landing at La Guardia Airport. He was seven and a half seconds away from the tarmac -- wheels out, lights on, all clear -- when along came the unthinkable. Out of the darkness, he spotted the American Airlines logo closing in from the right, getting bigger and bigger. When you're this close to the ground and you see something you don't want to see -- like another airplane heading for you -- tapping the brakes is not an option. The two planes missed, but not by much. A few hundred feet. Seconds. "Close call, huh?" the pilot said to the tower. "What's going on?" Which is just what the guys in the tower were thinking. "I'm not sure," the air-traffic controller said. "He just took the shot, and . . . whew! It was a slow roller, sir." An uncomfortable silence followed -- until the controller decided to try a little gallows humor. "What color were his eyes?"
That was January 23, 1998, at 6:19 p.m. Three months later, practically the same thing happened -- with just twenty feet of wiggle room -- apparently because of a spilled cup of coffee in the control tower. It happened eight months after that, too, during a light rain -- and it happened again twice last year, the worst year ever for La Guardia air traffic.
It keeps happening because at La Guardia, the world's busiest small airport, runway choreography is timed for maximum efficiency; arriving and departing planes are only seconds apart. The hurdle is La Guardia's famously outdated, short, intersecting runways, surrounded mostly by water and tormented by low-slung clouds. For more than a year now, the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated some of these near-tragedies, has urged the airport to space its takeoffs and landings further apart. They want to slow things down.
But the Federal Aviation Administration -- which has the right to disregard NTSB recommendations, and has thousands of planes to push through New York each day -- doesn't want things slowed down. Neither do the airlines, which have enough trouble getting in and out of La Guardia on time. And neither -- let's face it -- do many passengers, who've been groaning about delays for years. "This safety recommendation would unnecessarily impact the National Airspace System," the FAA replied to the NTSB in a memo last September. "Departure slots would be lost."
Last fall, after yet another close shave, an exasperated 757 pilot had enough. "After 34 years flying in and out of La Guardia, I now feel La Guardia has become a dangerous airport," he wrote in a complaint to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, an anonymous whistle-blower service. "Approach, tower, and controllers are stressed to the max. Air-Traffic Control is trying to stuff too many aircraft into too small an airport. I strongly feel La Guardia is an accident waiting to happen."
It had to happen sometime. After years of more and more flights and longer waits, we've finally hit critical mass. What was once a punctuality problem is now a safety problem -- not just at La Guardia, the heavyweight champ of delays, but also at JFK and Newark. The fates of all three are linked by the logjammed airspace they share.
Since 1996, New York air traffic has increased by a third, but the number of operational errors -- FAA jargon for controller slipups -- has jumped by 61 percent. Operational deviations, the label for slightly less life-threatening mistakes, have almost doubled. This year, New York controllers will screw up at least 70 times. And that's if we're lucky. "It's not because the controllers aren't good," says Mary Fackler Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation inspector general. "It's because they've been overworked."
Things aren't that much safer on the ground. As the number of scheduled flights increases, the risk of two planes' ramming into each other on a crowded runway jumps exponentially. This year -- again, if we're lucky -- JFK, La Guardia, and Newark will all weather four ground incursions, the FAA's term for close shaves on the tarmac. "Our study of close calls -- and La Guardia certainly has its share of those -- showed that when traffic doubles, the risks don't double; they quadruple," says Arnold Barnett, a statistician from MIT's Sloan School, who studied the risk of future collisions at the FAA's request.
How things got this bad is obvious -- too many planes trying to land on too few runways. Obsolete almost since the day it opened, pint-size La Guardia is now a punch line, like the Van Wyck. But what's not widely acknowledged is how, as the system frantically spends more dollars to fight delays, other equally vital functions get shortchanged. Ramp crews are pushed to cut their flight-turnaround times in half and prepare substitute planes faster. Flight dispatchers -- who are also responsible for signing off on safety regulations -- spend more time hastily recalibrating routes, and less on each individual plane. "Airline profitability is directly dependent on the amount of time they spend in the air and not waiting on the runway," says one Washington lawyer who works for the airlines. The whole culture of aviation is geared toward working the problem instead of fixing it.
New technology can ease the burden -- when, or if, we get any. Every decent-size boat on the Sound has a global-positioning system, but U.S. jets still don't. The FAA has yet to install a crucial radar technology to protect JFK and La Guardia from wind shear, the freak gusts that slap planes out of the sky (though every other major airport has it). Much of the air-traffic-control world still seems to be experiencing aviation in a Cold War context. The primary communication link between the La Guardia tower and the air-traffic command center in Washington is a black rotary-dial telephone. When I ask Leo Prusak, the control tower's traffic manager, if he needs better equipment, he's too busy working the problem to think about it. "I don't even know," he says. "I mean, we don't spend our day in that realm."
The safety gap extends to security against guns and explosives. Everyone from the FAA to the FBI acknowledges that New York is still a top terrorism target, but bomb-detection methods are lagging. Checked luggage on domestic flights is hardly ever scanned by metal detectors. In 1998, Congress mandated the installation of a new device for sensing explosive chemicals in baggage -- a response to the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, ten years earlier. Today, it's at more than 100 airports nationally, but fewer than a half-dozen machines serve all of JFK. And at every New York airport, the guards who handle the metal detectors and protect the gates -- hired by companies contracted by each airline -- receive minimal training and rarely make more than $7 an hour. "The fact is, the airline industry puts its money where its priorities are," says Bill McGee, a former flight dispatcher who covers the industry as editor of Consumer Reports Travel Letter. "We're basically getting what we pay for."
Even when the FAA can step in, it has problems dictating policy -- especially to the dozens of foreign airlines flying into New York. "It's an undeniable fact that there are two sets of rules in place, and the rules for foreign carriers are less stringent," McGee says. The results can be dreadful: In 1990, an Avianca flight from Colombia crashed over Long Island because the pilot used the wrong English phrase to say he was low on fuel. The descent and crash of Egypt Air 990 after liftoff from JFK two years ago was prompted, according to the NTSB, by a mentally unstable co-pilot who might have been screened out if he'd been subject to FAA-mandated medical testing.
But even if everyone follows the rules, the skies keep getting more crowded. The FAA projects that over the next decade, demand for flights at La Guardia will increase by 17 percent, or about 200 takeoffs and landings day -- which is a bit of a shock to the Port Authority, which manages the airport and says it's physically impossible. Newark is expected to rise by even more -- another fantasy scenario, according to the Port Authority. "You're looking at more planes in a smaller space, so you're eroding the margin of safety," says Bob Ober, a pilot who serves on the Air Traffic Procedure Advisory Committee, an interagency panel chartered by Congress. "We're hoping we don't have any system failures with radar and communication and planning. The idea here is, when these systems fail, will the redundancy programs be enough? We're pushing the envelope here with everything."
Last year, Congress deregulated flights at La Guardia, leading to a near-complete shutdown of the airport. The FAA, airlines, and Port Authority restored the status quo by agreeing to a provisional cap on takeoffs and landings without resolving the underlying problem. And the commercial-airline industry, with the second-largest lobby in Washington next to Big Tobacco, has just one response: Expand. Grow your way out of the problem.
"Increasing capacity is the only appropriate response to the public's needs," said Edward Merlis, a lobbyist with the Air Transport Association, at a Senate hearing in March, "and, in the long run, the only response that the public will accept."
The FAA's regional air-traffic-control center -- the tracon, for short -- is an unmarked white stucco building just off the Meadowbrook Parkway in Garden City, Long Island. Inside is a vast, shadowy amphitheater filled with controllers spinning track balls, their faces illuminated by the glow of computer monitors. A decade ago, the tracon employed 90 controllers; now there are 265. Their job is to keep tabs on every plane within 100 nautical miles (115 regular miles). They're the ones pilots talk to when they're just beyond the reach of an airport control tower. Planes farther out are handled by controllers at the New York Center in Ronkonkoma, Long Island.
The vibe is decidedly low-tech: The computer screens look like a networked game of Airplane Asteroids. The object of the game is to stop blips from hitting each other. And they're good at it, too: Operational errors have gone down in the past five years, while they've gone up 61 percent at Ronkonkoma.
It seems I've picked a bad time to stop by the tracon. "Please don't tape me -- we are very busy!" shouts a controller in the middle of the amphitheater. The problem today, I learn, is cloud cover over one of La Guardia's runways, a few miles away. This runway runs parallel to runways at Newark and Kennedy, so the controllers can usually work the problem by guiding planes in and out like preschoolers, in straight, orderly lines. But today, La Guardia has had to switch over to Runway 13 -- the other runway, the one that goes in precisely the wrong direction, northwest to southeast. And that's thrown everybody at the tracon into a tizzy. Everybody hates Runway 13.
To find the right angle to land, planes are backed up over Connecticut and New Jersey, routed in loops as wide as some counties. Gridlock starts spreading like an epidemic. Any pilot trying to get in or out of Newark, Kennedy, and Teterboro is being told to take a number.
"It's our absolute worst operation for efficiency, and you happened to hit it," says Phil Barbarello, the fifteen-year veteran tracon controller who is showing me around. "This happens about a half-dozen times a year."
The entire airspace over New York City has just been shut down because of an April shower.
In general, though, the days of planes stacked up like pancakes over an airport are behind us, says Frank Hatfield, an ex-Navy man and a former air-traffic controller with a bushy white mustache who moved here from Virginia four years ago to be the FAA's airspace czar. It's a policy change that he's proud of: Rather than let a plane take off for an airport that's experiencing delays or expecting a storm, a flight dispatcher will simply keep that plane on the ground.
But something else has changed, too, Hatfield says -- the pressure. At La Guardia, air traffic used to come and go in spurts. Now the pace is unrelenting. "Generally, there were periods in the day, you know, between 11 and 11:45, where there was gonna be a lull here at the airport -- so the controller can breathe in, breathe out, and just sit back and do a little mental refreshment while waiting for the next big rush," he says in his drawl. "Now you walk in and you strap on a headset and you don't stop until you take that headset off. And it doesn't matter what time you go in and do it. There are no lulls anymore."
Planes can only enter and exit New York's airspace through eight "gates" in the sky -- four to the north and four to the south. Add to that the fact that the busiest domestic routes in the U.S., maybe the world, are the New York- Boston and New York-Washington shuttles. "Each day, all the airports are competing to get planes through them," Hatfield says. "These guys in New York -- the traffic is all climbing, diving, swerving, to get in and out of the busiest airspace on the face of the earth. Worldwide, New York is the challenge."
Hatfield pauses for effect. "And you would ask, well, how come this airspace is so screwed up? Simple answer: When this airspace was designed back in the 1960s, we didn't have this many airplanes. We're trying to run millennium traffic on crap that was designed 40 years ago, and that just don't cut it."
More of the article is available at http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5068&position=1