To Control the Swarm

U.S. airports swarm with planes--in the air and on the field--while the nation conducts a search for solutions to a dangerously growing traffic jam. When Congress convenes next month, it will see one new proposal--a Senate Aviation Subcommittee call to spend $3 billion immediately, a total of $7 billion by 1975. Having just completed two months of hearings--the first thorough congressional review of airport problems since 1958--Subcommittee Chairman Mike Monroney says: "Every witness conceded that we are in a state of crisis."

The panel's report will urge creation of a U.S. trust fund for the air, similar to the federal highway fund. To help build it, a passenger head tax of $1.50 to $2 a ticket would double the $225 million raised annually by the present 5% airline tax. More money would come from an increase in the present 2-c--a-gallon aviation fuel tax, which is now paid by pilots of small private craft but not the airlines.

Private Problem. Monroney would spend the money on new flight-control systems and more metropolitan-area airports, with a view to handling the future's jumbo superjets and supersonic transports. He defends the plea for earmarked special funds by citing the already overwhelming load of education, poverty programs and the Viet Nam war on the nation's general revenues. As if to underscore that point, U.S.

Transportation Secretary Alan Boyd last week predicted "certain cuts" in present air-safety programs in the 1968 budget.

Airports are jammed largely because private pilots have as much freedom to fly when and where they please as motorists have to drive on their choice of roads. Airlines are assigned routes by the Government but make their own time schedules. The 2,379 commercial planes spent 6,000,000 hours aloft last year and 150,000 hours waiting to take off or land, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which figures that U.S. passengers wasted 10 million man-hours just waiting (see box). Some of this congestion was caused by the 32,-310 military aircraft and some by the airliners themselves, but most of it by the 104,706 light planes stacked up in rush-hour traffic. The FAA estimates that at the nation's 9,950 airports only 17.6% of the takeoffs and landings are made by commercial planes, while 77.8% are made by smaller private and executive planes. At major metropolitan airports, the percentages for these "general aviation" planes run lower but are still great enough to cause plenty of delay. Commercial airports with the highest general aviation activity are Denver (72%), Houston (67%), St. Louis (58%), Miami (54%).

Call for the Cop. Most programs to ease the glut try to treat aviation within the existing rule of individual right to the air. A few experts take a more radical tack. They would create a federal aviation traffic cop to assign not only flight routes but also schedules and air speeds, thus spreading the jarm out of rush hours. Instead of informing the FAA of his flight plan and being accommodated no matter what the crush, every civilian pilot would have to notify a controller of his intentions and ask: "When can I go?"

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