Have rockets gotten in your way?
Things could get much worse if Congress does not act quickly.
From
Bloomberg article:
There is a lot of money at stake. Airlines say their average cost of "block time". the industry metric for the period when an aircraft is taxiing or flying, was $68.48 per minute in 2017, or $4,109 hourly, led by crew and jet fuel expenses. The average delay of those 563 flights on Feb. 6 was 8 minutes. For perspective, 10 flights delayed by 10 minutes costs about $70,000, ALPA noted. To make matters worse, the block time average is likely to rise this year—further aggravating airline executives and pilots whenever a SpaceX or United Launch Alliance LLC rocket closes airspace.
“These restrictions have led to extensive and expensive delays to commercial air traffic that are unsustainable,” ALPA said in a white paper released Tuesday.
The U.S. airlines’ trade group, Airlines for America (A4A), has urged the FAA to “carefully consider the safety and efficiency impacts to the traveling public” in crafting an integration plan, spokeswoman Alison McAfee said in an email. For example, the group expressed “grave concerns” this month about a proposed Spaceport Colorado, which would be located at a small airport less than 10 miles southeast of Denver International, the fifth-busiest U.S. airport.
From:
Teslarati article:
Two primary problems were identified by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), ULA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX officials present before the Congressional committee: the extreme sluggishness of licensing and the similarly obtuse brute-force integration of launch vehicle operations with the federal systems of air traffic control tasked with safely orchestrating tens of thousands of aircraft flights daily.
Whereas nominal orbital rocket launches result in vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 spending less than 90 seconds of real time within the bounds of that controlled airspace, the massive and disruptive “keep-out zones” currently required by the FAA for rocket launches frequently disrupt air traffic for more than 100 times as long. According to Ms. Schenewerk, SpaceX believes it already possesses the capabilities to integrate live Falcon 9 and Heavy telemetry with air traffic control, allowing those keep out zones to be dramatically compressed and highly responsive to actual launch operations, similar to how aircraft traffic is dealt with today.