October 24, 2007
Government Asks Airlines to Ease J.F.K. Congestion
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — The United States Department of Transportation opened negotiations on Tuesday with 14 major domestic airlines about reducing traffic at Kennedy International Airport, in a combination of cooperation and threat.
A poster in the conference room warned the airline representatives that it was illegal for them to discuss schedules, markets served or prices in earshot of one another, and antitrust lawyers from the Justice Department were present to observe, participants said.
After a pep talk by the secretary of transportation, Mary E. Peters, and the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Bobby Sturgell, the airline executives were taken to separate rooms and brought back one by one to talk to government officials about their schedules.
At some hours, Kennedy has more than 100 scheduled arrivals and departures. The F.A.A. said the airport actually handled 80 or 81 per hour this summer, which is the maximum the Transportation Department wants the airlines to schedule.
The airlines said Kennedy could handle more with better equipment and procedures, and have complained that the department’s target number is too strict. Another problem is that some traffic may migrate to Newark, adding to delays there.
The government is hopeful it can get “voluntary” reductions, which would then be codified into a regulation. If the airlines do not “volunteer,” the government has said it could set quotas and assign slots. But, Ms. Peters said, “We have high hopes for market-based incentives.”
The D.O.T. has said it may order landing fees that vary by the hour as an incentive to move flights to off-peak periods. But Ms. Peters said, “We may very well need scheduling reductions to help solve congestion in the near term.”
The Bush administration has come to that point reluctantly, after concluding that delays in New York were triggering delays all over the country. Slot controls limit competition and give priority to “incumbent” carriers, those that are well established, and not to start-ups, Transportation Department officials say.
The airlines hate the idea of variable landing fees, and some government officials doubt they will work, because the price difference between landing peak and off-peak would come to a couple of dollars per passenger, or less. The Transportation Department says it has the authority to vary the fees, but only so they are “revenue neutral,” so the total amount collected by the airport does not change. The airlines say they will sue if it tries.
Ms. Peters told the airline representatives, “Publishing schedules that offer 61 departing flights between 8 and 9 a.m. — when the airport can handle only 44 departures — is not fair to fliers.”
Years-old federal controls on how many planes can use Kennedy ended on Jan. 1. Since then, traffic jumped 20 percent, according to the F.A.A., to 1,200 flights a day from 1,000. In August, it was 1,300 flights a day.
According to the F.A.A., one result is that there are 77.4 delays per 1,000 landings or takeoffs so far this year, continuing a steady rise — there were 20.9 in 2003, 27.5 in 2004, 39.6 in 2005 and 60.4 in 2006. The figures count only delays while a plane is in the air traffic control system; delays because of mechanical problems or because a plane arrived late from its previous leg are not included.
A negotiated settlement at O’Hare International Airport at the end of 2004 cut delays per 1,000 operations there to 52.7 in 2005 from 97.1 in 2004, but they rose to 68.5 in 2006. They are running slightly lower this year.
The Port Authority said Monday that the F.A.A. target would “simply cut flights and limit travelers’ options to pre-1969 levels.”
“If this limitation were in place at J.F.K. last year, the airport would have turned away nearly 3.4 million passengers, or 10,000 per day,” the Port Authority said in statement.