Posted on 03/07/2004 12:36:36 PM PST by Archangelsk
New, Smaller Planes Crowding Skies Once Left to Big Jets By MATTHEW L. WALDWASHINGTON, March 6 — For years the skies have been crowded with airplanes, but the planes' capabilities have kept them at different altitudes, with small, piston-driven models a few thousand feet above ground, commuter turboprops in the 20,000-foot range and jet airliners at 30,000 feet or higher.
Now, to the dismay of aviation experts, an increasing number of planes may begin competing for space at the same higher altitudes. The turboprops are disappearing and being replaced by "regional jets," which fly at big-jet altitudes. Some of the older, larger jetliners are disappearing, too, each being replaced by two small regional jets.
The number of corporate jet flights is on the rise as the economy rebounds, in planes owned by major corporations or shared through fractional ownership, sold somewhat like time-share condominiums. And manufacturers of private planes are planning new "microjets" — small, relatively cheap planes designed for flying at the altitudes, if not the speeds, of the big airliners.
The changes are happening as the industry recovers from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, SARS and the Iraq war, and as the level of air traffic returns to near its 2001 peak, when delays kept millions of passengers waiting in airport lounges and on planes in takeoff lines.
"We're expecting a crunch in late spring or summer," said H. Keith Hagy, assistant director of the engineering and air safety department at the Air Line Pilots Association.
Others put the critical point slightly later, but Mr. Hagy and other experts agree that a proliferation of small jets is part of the problem. There are almost 500 regional jets, or R.J.'s, on order, and they are entering the system at the rate of about 200 a year, representing nearly all of the growth in airliner aviation.
"There's going to be a lot more competition for the airspace," said David Watrous, the president of an industry advisory group, the RTCA, formerly known as the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics.
Top officials of the Federal Aviation Administration say the trends will challenge them. At a meeting of the RTCA last month, Russell Chew, the agency's chief operating officer, said air traffic costs were based mostly on the number of planes, not on how big they were. "Capacity has already begun to become tight again," Mr. Chew said in a speech.
The agency's revenue comes from ticket taxes, but ticket revenues are flat or declining. "The financial pressures are going to be enormous," Mr. Chew said.
In January, the secretary of transportation said the F.A.A. would need to triple its capacity to handle traffic in the next few years. But the administration's budget for the agency for the next fiscal year calls for an 18 percent cut in spending on new facilities and equipment, which led the agency to shelve several projects intended to increase capacity.
Ruth Marlin, the executive vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said runway congestion, the traditional choke point for the system, could be made worse by a switch from turboprops to jets, because many airports have one runway for each.
The turboprops, which are planes with jet engines that turn propellers, can use older, shorter runways of less than 6,000 feet, but if the runway is given over to small jets carrying the same number of seats, the turboprop has to compete with the big jets for time on the bigger runway.
A former president of the Air Line Pilots Association, J. Randolph Babbitt, said, "At La Guardia, you can still only land them one every 54 seconds, or whatever the number du jour is."
Mr. Babbitt, now a consultant, said: "There's a finite amount of concrete. If you take one 747 out and put two R.J.'s in, it's just one more aircraft in the air traffic environment and the runway environment."
The number of regional jets could eventually be dwarfed by a new class of private jets meant to replace high-end private planes with piston engines. Eclipse Aviation, of Albuquerque, plans to begin delivering a four-seat, twin-engine jet in 2006, for under $1 million each, which would cut current prices in half. The company already has more than 2,000 orders.
The crowding is reviving friction between the airlines and other operators. At the RTCA meeting, Ira G. Pearl, the director of flight operations at Delta Air Lines, complained that in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., one recent Saturday, one of his company's wide-body jets, with 200 passengers on board, was delayed 45 minutes as it waited for takeoff behind 13 corporate jets.
The F.A.A. has always operated on a first-come-first-served basis, but, Mr. Pearl said, "H.O.V. lanes in the sky are something to think about" — meaning a system like car-pool lanes on a highway, also called high-occupancy-vehicle lanes, in which planes would get priority according to how many people they carried.
Peter West, the spokesman for the National Business Aviation Association, responded in a telephone interview that business flights were a sign of a healthy economy, which would help provide the growth that would keep the airlines healthy, and that the solution was to increase capacity.
In fact, the aviation agency recently added capacity by changing the traffic pattern above 30,000 feet, so planes can fly within 1,000-foot layers instead of 2,000-foot layers. It also has a new system for planes to navigate using a combination of guideposts, including the global positioning system and ground-based radio beacons, and to take direct paths rather than following established lanes in the sky. But it has published procedures for the system for only a handful of airports.
Alternately, they could try a free-market approach and charge for takeoff/landing slots on a competitive-bid basis. You want to fly on peak? Pay peak rates.
Have the proceeds pay for expansion
I can see a good reason to keep a control tower far away from me, however, and I hear from the rich duffers that they want fancier digs. Jets can land without one, of course, but they don't like it.
Wonder what'll happen in a fuel shortage? Surely, flying a hundred babyjets takes more fuel than one Delta--and I'll bet Delta gets first dibs, anyhow.
But there's no sidewalks near me, but there are lots of little toy planes in the air overhead. As there's no sidewalks, and lots of planes, your actuarial analyses don't apply to me.
Does the liability insurance protect me against drunk pilots, BTW? I suppose you've never met one?
It's not just getting killed, it's all that mess afterwards. I mean, it'd get grease all over everything.
I absolutely love the regional jets. in a 1-2 configuration you have a 66% chance of a window, which I love, or a window and an aisle seat at the same time. Small planes mean short planing/deplaning times, and they are just as fast and smooth as their larger brethren.
I know that it's silly but I still have trouble believing a very large plane can fly, despite incontrovertible evidence :-).
I moved from an urban area to a rural area to escape all that comes with the big tax base of an urban area. I like living on streets that have little traffic, and I'd rather have a few more potholes to dodge than have smoother roads with more traffic. School performance is a function of family health and parental involvement. More money for the school system doesn't mean better schools. These airports may provide a few more jobs, but with the jobs will come an increased cost of living. People who had been saving for a house or anything else may suddenly find their goals a little further out of reach. More people in an area will generate more demand on the local government. The result will be higher property taxes and not lower taxes as you claim.
I'd love to see alternatives to traditional air travel. I'd love to see people reject all that air travel has become with the security hassles. However, the notion that people who aren't around big airports will find their quality of life better with more planes coming to small airports is wildly inaccurate.
WFTR
Bill
Delta favors the MD-88 right now. You'd be surprised how much leg room the CRJ-700 (70 seats) and CRJ-900 (90 seats) have.
Next up - "ADS-B".
An excerpt from:
www.gaservingamerica.org/how_work/work_ads.htm
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)Imagine one day in the near future looking at a multifunction display (MFD) in your cockpit and seeing virtually the same traffic information as air traffic control. Oh, and by the way, your MFD also shows you the latest weather, both text and graphics. That is the promise that ADS-B -- Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast -- holds for general aviation, and it is one very large step closer to reality now that the FAA has decided what systems will be used for "linking" the information to aircraft.
The ADS-B system, and others like it being offered by non-governmental providers, holds great promise for pilots to bring real-time weather, air traffic, temporary flight restriction (TFRs), and enhanced situational awareness information in the cockpit.
The new technology takes advantage of the Global Positioning System (GPS), a network of satellites that can accurately determine the position of a given object to within 10 meters. Dubbed GPS-Squitter, the technology determines a plane's position via GPS then squitters, or broadcasts, that position?plus the plane's identification?to all listeners.
The ADS-B architecture announced by the FAA in July of 2002 calls for a higher-end system using a Mode S extended GPS-squitter for air carriers and high-altitude general aviation aircraft, and a lower cost but highly capable system using a universal access transceiver (UAT) for the typical GA user, which functions much like the Internet connection in your home or office.
ADS-B-equipped aircraft digitally broadcast their positions derived from the on-board GPS receivers to other ADS-B-equipped aircraft and to ground stations. The information includes position, altitude, airspeed, and projected track, which can then be displayed on an aircraft's MFD or an air traffic controller's screen. Proof-of-concept trials were conducted in Alaska under the name Project Capstone, proved that ADS-B can greatly extend ATC's view of all air traffic by using remote ground receivers where air search radars would be impractical and feeding the remote signals back to the controller's screen.
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