Congress encouraged to blend air & space flights.

[.Scott]

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.

[roybert]

Scott
I have a problem with this article as the report can't do simple math. "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."
At $68.50 per minute as the average block cost, then a 10 minute block would be $685.00 per aircraft multiply that by 10 aircraft would only equal $ 6850.00. Even if you use the $4109.00 hourly rate for the 10 aircraft is still on $41090.00 far short of the $70,000.00 quoted. Also I recently flew United from IAD to EWR which departed the gate on time and then sat on a taxiway for 30 minutes because according to the pilot they didn't have a landing slot at EWR. So I'm not sure how concerned they are about flight delay especially for rocket launches in Florida.

[.Scott]

For perspective, 10 flights delayed by 10 minutes costs about $70,000, ALPA noted.

Originally Posted by roybert

At $68.50 per minute as the average block cost, then a 10 minute block would be $685.00 per aircraft multiply that by 10 aircraft would only equal $ 6850.00.

I'm thinking this isn't the first time that lobbyists haven't gotten their math right while describing things to Congress.
But good catch, it made it past the Congressman, Bloomberg, and myself before someone caught it.
It's also funny that the punchline from the lobbyist was "We are smart enough to solve this problem"! ???

I still think it would be a good idea to have ATC involved. As described in the article, airspace use is 90 seconds for a launch and a short time for the landing (Bloomberg article says 1 minute, but is that the correct number). Why tie things up longer than they need to be?

[ShotOne]

You can quibble over the exact figure all day but the delay is far more than ten minutes. The fact is, closing airspace unnecessarily costs a great deal of money; as Scott says, why do it for longer than necessary?

[Ian W]

Originally Posted by ShotOne

You can quibble over the exact figure all day but the delay is far more than ten minutes. The fact is, closing airspace unnecessarily costs a great deal of money; as Scott says, why do it for longer than necessary?

If the flights are passenger carrying reusable launch vehicles they should be safe enough to not need vast 'debris field' restricted airspace. The deorbit is planned well in advance or for hypersonics known well in advance so there is no need to close airspace down hours before. These are all procedures developed for the Space Shuttle which was designed to a far lower reliability/safety requirement than a commercial passenger carrying craft. It seems that rather than enforce the habitual and well known restricted airspace some work should be done based on the actual risks of each launch. That could considerably reduce the interference with normal routine flights.