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Not that bad (115 min). About 60.

Sequester cuts: effects on travel.
 

My luck ran out, I finally got caught in a sequester-related delay. Here is my personal experience thus far:

4/21: LAS-DFW-RDU. No delays
4/22: RDU-ORD. No delays
4/23: ORD-EWR. 90 minute delay

Tomorrow is EWR-ATL, late afternoon departure, so I figure another 90 min delay or worse can be expected :mad:

You also have to understand that the DOT can't just decide on it's own what to cut. If congress has passed laws saying the DOT will spend such and such on such and such, they *must* spend it. This is actually a constitutionally backed legal requirement, they can not underspend where congress has directed them to spend. They can only cut where congress tells them to cut, or make cuts from those without specified spending.

Most political commentators know this, they just choose not to mention it.

Also, seriously, a Women in Transport History website is not going to be a big ticket item here. So the pundit was really scraping the barrel looking for things to yell about. And I think the communities grant is a legal requirement to protect residential areas around airports. So one thing that would raise a trivial amount by cutting it, and another thing that would end with the government being sued if they cut it. Hardly insightful choices.

As for the listing of costs... Sure, travel and consultant fees are expensive. But you know what, the DOT has to do a whole lot of things to do with safety inspections and maintenance with a minimum number of people, moving them around the country and having to hire third party contractors because "we have to keep government small, hire in contractors rather than have another federal employee!". Stop complaining about the cost of reducing the size of government.

This is why the WSJ is not a serious newspaper when it comes to political comment. They select people who write things their readers want to hear for their opinion pages.

Barberio - Well said.

To your point about hiring consultants and contractors to keep government small, who was for contracting/privatizing small towers? And now it's come back to bite as the private agencies have sued to keep them running. If they were under the government all along the government would have more ability to make cuts where most needed.


----

To my previous post on LA Center ...looking better today than they expected.

The WSJ piece completely refutes your arguments, to wit:

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in "Flight Delays as Political Strategy," but the story gets worse the closer we look.

Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can't deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

Ponder this logic, if that's the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won't arrive on time.

The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travellers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama's "passenger bill of rights," the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. But sauce for the goose is apparently an open bar for the FAA gander.

The White House claims the sequester applies to the budget category known as "projects, programs and activities" and thus it lacks flexibility. Not so: This is a political pose to make the sequester more disruptive. Legally speaking, the sequester applies at a more general level known as "accounts." The air traffic account includes 15,000 controllers out of 31,000 employees. The White House could keep the controllers on duty simply by allocating more furlough days to these other non-essential workers.

Instead, the FAA is even imposing the controller furlough on every airport equally, not prioritizing among the largest and busiest airports. San Francisco's Napa Valley airport with no commercial service will absorb the same proportion of the cuts as the central New York radar terminal, which covers La Guardia, JFK and Newark International, as well as MacArthur, Teterboro, New Haven, Republic and other regional fields.

*** [edited to comply with TOS]

The FAA's troubles are the result of bad management and a lack of oversight, according to multiple Department of Transportation Inspector General audits. A 2011 investigation found that one part of NextGen ran $330 million over budget—or half of the FAA sequester—and then the FAA paid the contractor responsible $150 million in bonuses that were supposed to be an incentive for making the budget targets. The overruns are now approaching $500 million, and that's merely one item.

Meanwhile, ever since Al Gore launched a training initiative to increase the productivity of air traffic controllers in 1998, productivity has continued to fall. A larger workforce is now in charge of a smaller workload as the number of flights has dropped by 23%. As the Inspector General reports, "FAA data suggest that its overall staffing may not be optimal."

A rational government would use the sequester to improve on this sorry record. But instead this White House is responding to the FAA's failures by making the flying experience for millions of Americans even more unfriendly. It is actively creating even more delays, cancellations and missed connections in order to incite a public outcry on behalf of bigger government.


To repeat - there is absolutely no need to slow down air traffic at major hubs due to the federal budget. Rather, it is Obama, through his political appointees at DOJ, who has decided to inconvenience all of us in order to gain leverage in the budget talks. Disgusting.

A couple of quick corrections (and by no means complete - just quick) to the above:

- There are six months to make these cuts, from April 7 to September. That means this cut is being compressed into a smaller time period. While if stretched over a year the cuts would be 4-5 percent, compressed into six months they are 9-10 percent.

- It is not just air traffic controllers who are being furloughed. All FAA employees are.

- The number of departures has fallen, the number of operations - which is the full picture of what air traffic controllers do - has increased since 9/11. The amount of spending since has stayed about the same when adjusted for inflation. Further back in this thread, I posted the operations at towers, TRACONs and centers comparing 2001 and 2012.

While there were perhaps other ways this could have been handled to lessen the impact to travelers, I would not rely on the WSJ for accurate information.

Problems just intensified on traffic to the East Coast. Too many competing restrictions are confusing the FAA computers. Crews are timing out as airlines are being assigned delays up to five-hour delays.

ATC is a very complex profession. A controller takes years of training before they can safely work on their own in a facility. The larger enroute centers that control hundreds of square miles of airspace and altitudes above approach controls (typically 10,000 to 99,000 feet) are broken down into areas of specialty. Each of these centers typically staffs 300-400 controllers and then breaks down that workforce into each of those specialty areas. With this said, many ATC facilities throughout the US are inadequately staffed and have a lot of controllers currently in training. This varying staffing exists throughout these area of specialties. Areas of specialties that handle more complex airspace or airspace that works high volume traffic (feeder sectors into ATL, ORD, etc) have a harder time getting trainee controllers fully certified. Their trainee failure rate and early retirement numbers are a lot higher (more stress). When furloughs take place each day, the entire enroute facility reduces its workforce by 10%, regardless of specialty areas. Some of these specialty areas are impacted worse than others. Controllers cannot just swap specialty areas on a whim to "even out" staffing. They would need to undergo training and certification requirements that take many hours to complete and another controller acting as a trainer to oversee their training.

Cutting at lower level facilities is not a perfect solution. A large percentage of the controller workforce is eligible to retire now. If you cut lower level facilities, you might be ok for near future to meet current budget needs. However, after several retirements occur, you are left with an understaffed facility. Controllers cannot be hired and put on the job immediately, it takes 2-3 years in most cases to hire, train and certify a controller at a facility. The sequester has also shut down FAA hiring of controllers and its training academy in OKC. With no new hires coming in the door and senior controllers continuing to retire, you are compressing the workforce from both ends with no quick fix solution.

Excellent explanations jaxcntrlr.

Post-strike air traffic control system included military controllers and supervisors that were unfamiliar and untrained on the airspace they were controlling and the equipment they were using. It was a very dangerous scenario. Delays and traffic management procedures put in place during those days were a lot worse that what we have experienced so far with sequester.

Compare air traffic volume statistics and number of air traffic control towers within the US in 1981 to today. That same strategy today would be very dangerous.

I don't doubt any of that. But you know, somehow Reagan managed to keep planes from falling out of the sky even after terminating 11,000 ATCs. Where there is a will there is a way. The fact that Huerta cannot seem to manage the same task with far fewer layoffs mandates only 2 conclusions: He is either incompetent or is following orders to make the cuts as painful as possible to the public.

In any case, the strategy is now backfiring, as evidenced by the WSJ's latest report. I expect Congress will soon "discover" a funding solution that Obama will readily sign onto.

** FROM TODAY'S WSJ:

Complaints about air-travel delays in recent days have prompted Democrats in Congress to reconsider their strategy for dealing with across-the-board spending cuts.

This week, the Federal Aviation Administration began furloughing air-traffic controllers to comply with the required cuts, known as the sequester. Airlines and some lawmakers have said the FAA is taking a rigid approach to the cutbacks, applying them in a way that has led to flight delays across the country, especially at airports in the Northeast.

The FAA and the controllers' union agreed to distribute furloughs evenly among all controllers, whether they were at busy or quiet airports.

Now some Democrats are gathering behind bills aimed at easing the air-travel problems, putting them at odds with party leaders, who say any response should blunt the overall impact of the sequester, rather than target individual problems such as the flight delays.

While some Democrats on Wednesday moved to aid air passengers, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has renewed his effort to repeal the sequester, urging Democrats this week to coalesce around a plan to replace the cuts with money saved from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Reid said his plan would give Democrats and Republicans time to work out a longer-term fiscal deal.

*** [snip]
Any new bill aimed at the air-travel woes would likely come to the Senate floor shortly after lawmakers return from next week's recess, a Senate Democratic aide said.

Some Democrats think the Senate should act sooner.

"It is better to do a big deal. But as we work toward it, we have to admit that some things are very problematic," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who on Wednesday introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) designed to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility to manage the cuts with the goal of reducing furloughs at the FAA.

The bill would give the FAA the flexibility to transfer funds between accounts to reduce furloughs and give the Department of Transportation the authority to move funds from other areas of its budget to the FAA. The Department of Transportation administers the FAA.

Another Democrat, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, on Wednesday announced legislation that would reinstate air-traffic controllers using funds generated by ending a tax break for corporate jets. Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware said he would prefer to generate additional user fees to keep the travel system running at full capacity for the next five months.

"The public's going to be furious when they find out that this could have been prevented," said Sen. Dan Coats (R., Ind.), who supports the bipartisan proposal to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility in dealing with the FAA cuts. The aviation agency has said it can't avoid furloughs in the course of complying with the mandated budget cuts.

Big delays today in NYC metro. According to NATCA, the controllers union, it was due to an equipment outage at JFK and the FAA technical personnel assigned to fix it was furloughed.


"The localizer at JFK that helps aircraft land on Runway 22 Left has failed. The FAA employee who would be assigned to repair it is on a furlough day today. As a result, the JFK operation remains in its most inefficient runway configuration. Controllers are using Runway 13 for arrivals; this is done "three times a year here" according to NATCA officials at JFK. The altered traffic patterns to accommodate the use of this runway have created a domino effect, impacting the very complex flight routes above the New York City/New Jersey area. This has caused problems and delays for LGA and EWR and has basically shut down Teterboro altogether."

https://www.facebook.com/NATCAfamily

Things today aren't quite what they were in 1981. Then there were 14,000 commercial flights (about half of what there are now, and we're not talking about military, GA and other operations worked by ATC) daily and airlines were ordered to reduce them by 50 percent after the firings. About 3000 supervisors and 1000 military controllers helped to replace the fired controllers (about 1200 of which returned within a week). Those who remained were working 60-hour weeks (today all overtime is canceled.) If we are to look at this model, we should be seeing about 20 percent of flights canceled each day. We're seeing delays. Quite an improvement over mass cancellations.

The system has still never recovered from that mass firing to keep up with traffic.

So you're correct that planes didn't fall out of the sky; but 50 percent of flights never made it to the skies.

Looks like the Senate just approved relief.