Delays drop as O'Hare gets break

FAA, airlines say changes working

June 18, 2001|By Jon Hilkevitch, Tribune transportation reporter.

Although the on-time performance of airlines improved slightly in early 2001, the real test has just begun: Almost half of all flight delays in the United States each year typically occur from mid-June through August, during the summer travel and thunderstorm season.

But the most frustrating type of delay to passengers--called the ground stop, during which planes at the affected airports are not allowed to depart, often for hours--is expected to idle O'Hare International Airport less often this summer.

The airlines often add to the problem by loading passengers onto planes anyway, shutting the doors and pushing back from the gate to secure a place in a line of up to 80 aircraft waiting to depart.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines have vowed to do a better job of anticipating the weather-related knots that tie up the nation's air-traffic system and to stop punishing travelers with delays at busy O'Hare when the situation is actually unraveling elsewhere.

The ground stop is designed to manage reduced capacity and to head off even worse delays and cancellations. A ground-stop order prevents aircraft at the specified airports from taking off if they are bound for destinations socked in by bad weather. It also takes effect when there are too many planes for air-traffic controllers to safely manage during a storm.

In the past the FAA concentrated many of the ground stops at O'Hare to relieve congestion in other parts of the system. It seemed like the easy call: Instead of spreading out the ground stops at many airports, O'Hare was singled out because of the huge volume of flights through Chicago.

But that meant passengers who travel through O'Hare suffered disproportionately.

"We'd look on our aircraft situation display and see planes from Atlanta, Louisville, Detroit and San Francisco departing for the New York area, but we couldn't," said Craig Burzych, a controller and the union president at the O'Hare tower. "Instead of telling O'Hare to stop 20 percent of its flights and spreading the ground stops around, somebody was being lazy and saying, `Stop the big guy in Chicago.' It's not fair for us to go down the tubes."

The FAA acknowledged the problem and has implemented changes.

Coordination is key

"There was a major training effort over the winter, not only with FAA controllers throughout the system but also with airline dispatchers, to learn the issues each has to work with and to coordinate our efforts better," said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro.

Between April 12 and June 13, United Airlines canceled 650 departures from O'Hare. During the same period last year, the airline canceled 2,397 flights, a figure that was likely inflated because the airline was embroiled in a contract dispute with pilots, who refused to work overtime, and because the weather across the nation was much worse last year.

This summer, more emphasis is being placed on better coordination between the FAA and the airlines so that the ground stop is not the knee-jerk reaction to severe weather.

Often, predicted weather does not materialize or shows up at different times and locations than what was forecast. FAA officials and airline schedulers said up to 40 percent of the delays can be avoided if restrictions like ground stops and cancellations are implemented in a surgical manner rather than as a blanket practice.

"The FAA has come to recognize that it's not fair to O'Hare's customers," said Peter McDonald, senior vice president of airport services at United. "There isn't the same rate of ground stops at Midway, Minneapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati or any of the other airports in the Midwest."

The FAA is now more focused on identifying flights that will be affected by severe weather and quickly mapping reroutes around the hazards, McDonald said.

"We're seeing fewer ground stops and significantly improved operations at O'Hare this year," he said.

Even as flight delays and cancellations hit record levels at O'Hare and other congested airports in the past two years, many of the disruptions could have been eased without the heavy reliance on ground stops, aviation experts said.

Meteorologists working for the FAA, the airlines and the National Weather Service concede that the ability to predict the weather for aviation purposes is weakest when looking ahead two to six hours, often resulting in restrictions being imposed too early or too late.

But studies conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that up to 40 percent of the delays and cancellations could be avoided through better collaboration between the FAA and the airlines. In addition, attention is being focused on reducing the standard separation between airplanes on routes affected by poor weather in order to increase the flow of traffic.

Letting pilots make call

The airlines, which have complained that the FAA is too conservative in the name of safety--creating "no-fly zones" along air corridors hours before bad weather is forecast to hit--said they have seen changes this year that give more discretion to the pilots.

Part of the impetus comes from U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who has called for a bigger decision-making role in the cockpit, where weather-radar equipment provides much more accurate information than the images air-traffic controllers see on their screens.

A controller may feel confident in halting traffic based on computer-generated storm cells depicted on a monitor. But pilots flying near the severe weather often see a different picture on their instruments.