Saturated Sky

While Government and industry groped for ways to alleviate America's aerial arteriosclerosis, the traffic jam in the skies shifted from acute to chronic. The glut that has all but congealed the New York City metropolitan area's "Bird Cage"--Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark airports--now spreads confusion across the country and abroad, shredding connecting schedules in Los Angeles and squeezing service in Miami. Fortnight ago, "Black Friday" choked the Golden Triangle between New York City, Chicago and Washington with 2,079 delays. Black Friday now is every day. The situation cannot possibly get better before it gets worse.

Chicago's O'Hare, the world's busiest commercial airport, sometimes was logging two-hour tieups. One frustrated Detroit-bound passenger decided to drive instead--and almost beat the plane. An English tourist in Los Angeles sampled U.S. airline hang-ups and threatened to take a ship home through the Panama Canal. A pilot flying from Bermuda to New York advised passengers on takeoff--accurately, as it turned out--of his three-hour flight plan: "Two to get there and one to circle." American Airlines reported that the previous week's average 88-min. delay at Kennedy rose last week to one day's average of 3 hr. 14 min. on the Chicago-to-New York run. Before the crisis, rush-hour delays at Kennedy averaged 30 min.

Picking Up the Slack. Pilots circling in tortuous holding patterns quickly exhaust their maximum allowable filing time. National Airlines by last week had canceled vacations and slashed 64 flights from this month's schedule. Northeast Airlines scrapped eight in one day. Last year delays cost the airlines $50 million. This year, in the Golden Triangle alone, they are hitting $1,000,000 a day. Uncounted--and largely unnoticed--additional losses come from air-cargo delays. New York Customs Broker Jack Hyams said that Kennedy Airport has freight stacked up "practically to the runway," with three-week delays for some local deliveries after shipments have been landed.

Charles C. Tillinghast, president of Trans World Airlines, last week called for industry-wide sessions on the crisis. He suggested shifting rush-hour flights to outlying terminals. More drastic was his proposal to end rush hour itself by changing schedules. By week's end the Civil Aeronautics Board authorized the talks. Airliners soon may be diverted at peak hours from congested airports, and passengers on peak-hour flights may have to pay premium rates. The industry blames the glut partly on private planes, but barring them from major airports would hardly dent the crush. At Kennedy, they make an estimated 10% of the flights. New York City's three major terminals at last count had 162 scheduled flights in and out bet veen 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. each day.

3-D Slot Track. Obviously, solving aviation's crisis will take vast amounts of money for new airports and equipment, and far more aerial traffic cops than the 14,000 controllers the Federal Aviation Administration now has in 340 terminals and 27 centers across the U.S.

To dramatize their overwork and the limitations of radar tracking equipment no longer able to cope with the crowded sky, the newly unionized controllers began to play the game according to the book. They invoked long-avoided regulations requiring at least a three-mile separation between planes for safety (in recent months, aircraft had been allowed as close as two miles). One proposal to ease the jam included a temporary shutdown of 335 FAA-manned flight service stations and transfer of their 900 controllers to busier towers.

Oklahoma Senator Mike Monroney says aviation needs 600 new airports right now, costing an immediate $3 billion, plus $8 billion more in the next decade. Every ten days, 13 new commercial jets take off to join the 2,521 already in the air; 17 new private aircraft go aloft each day. Airline traffic is up 17.4% so far this year.

Some day, perhaps, the air will be fully automated, a three-dimensional slot car track with computer-controlled aircraft shuffling around the sky without crowding or possible human error. Meanwhile, the Senate last week passed a bill exempting the FAA from blanket manpower cuts, enabling the agency to hire 3,627 more air controllers at a cost of $145 million. Once hired, they will take two years to train.

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