We'd be better off if we auctioned off the landing and take-off rights at our congested airports, every, say, 5 years. Determine how many takeoffs and landings can reasonably be accommodated, and auction off that many slots. Corporate jets can bid for them if it is worth it to them. But if they had to compete with fully-loaded 737s, 747s, Airbuses and 777s, they'd probably decide it was worthwhile to land at Teterboro or Stewart or Westchester, or one of the other smaller airports. And if there was a choice to be made between holding up a jet with 100, 200, 300 or more passengers, and one with, say, 5 or 10 or 15, the choice should be to let the larger jet proceed and the smaller one wait for a less congested hour. Would our 1% appreciate that? Possibly not. But are their interests the ones we ought to be concerned with?
N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Delays - NYTimes.com.
N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Delays - NYTimes.com.
Delays are a fact of life at New York’s three main airports.
Each day, thousands of passengers are stuck on planes at the airports — Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International — sitting in line behind a dozen other planes waiting to take off or circling overhead until they get clearance to land.
And the delays persist, despite changes in procedures and schedules by the airlines, airports and Federal Aviation Administration over the years. (In the latest move, the F.A.A. last fall created new flight paths out of Kennedy to speed up departures.) Even a significant drop in the number of flights since the economy slowed has not helped much. Flight delays last year in New York were as bad as they were five years ago.
In the first half of 2011, the region’s airspace — defined as the big three airports, plus Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which caters to corporate jets, and Philadelphia International Airport — handled 12 percent of all domestic flights but accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation. In the same period in 2005, they represented just a third of all delays, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
These delays ripple across the country. A third of all delays around the nation each year are caused, in some way, by the New York airports, according to the F.A.A. Or, as Paul McGraw, an operations expert with Airlines for America, the industry trade group, put it, “When New York sneezes, the rest of the national airspace catches a cold.”
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