Segment 2 Of 2     Previous Hearing Segment(1)

SPEAKERS       CONTENTS       INSERTS    
 Page 11       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
THE RECENT INCREASE IN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL DELAYS

Thursday, October 14, 1999
House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Aviation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Washington, D.C.

    The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m., in Room 2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John J. Duncan, Jr. [chairman of the subcommittee] Presiding.
    Mr. DUNCAN. I first want to say good morning and welcome everyone to this hearing today and call the hearing to order at this time.
    We are having this hearing to discuss the huge increases in the number of delays in the air traffic control system over these past several months. Over the last few months, millions of travelers have experienced very long flight delays. In 1997 the National Civil Aviation Review Commission predicted that aviation gridlock would soon occur, and it seems as though we may be getting closer to that point by the events of the last few months.
    Everyone is frustrated—passengers, airlines, government agencies. The flying public expects airlines to provide an efficient system to get from point to point, and they are not getting what they expect. The airlines cannot do their job and cannot meet the demand because the air traffic control system is unable to let them do so. Something must be done to correct this situation and not just to Band-Aid the system, but some type of overhaul appears to be necessary.
    I don't think the flying public will accept finger pointing or just telling us what the problem is, but the flying public today expects solutions, and I think it has become obvious that we need to do something different, something new, better. A better job must be done. We must come up with some way to really shake up the system.
 Page 12       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Everyone wants better service, but the way in which our air traffic control system operates today people are not receiving what they expect and what they are demanding or very soon will be demanding. In fact, many feel that the problem is growing worse. The FAA reported last year the airlines carried approximately 650 million passengers, and it is a great thing that they did that without a single commercial fatality.
    The agency estimates by the year 2010 this number will grow to approximately 1 billion passengers a year or possibly even more. Air passenger traffic is shooting way up. Air cargo traffic they tell me is going up at a rate 2 and a half times as fast as air passenger traffic.
    The ABC Sunday News Show this week recently reported that in Chicago delays are up nearly 100 percent for the first 5 months of this year over last year. They are up 250 percent in Detroit, 100 percent in Dallas and an astounding 850 percent in Memphis.
    During this past summer, there were approximately 1,400 flight delays a day, which inconvenienced some 140,000 passengers every day. The airlines tell us that these delays have cost the industry $4 billion last year and that they cost passengers in wasted time over 28,000 hours a day, an amazing total. Continental Airlines reported that flight times on one of the most traveled corridors between Washington and the New York City area that would normally be 37 minutes are now scheduled to take up to 75 minutes.
    According to the Department of Transportation Inspector General, scheduled flight times have increased on 75 percent of the 200 busiest routes over the last 10 years. Delays alone cost U.S. Air over $61 million from January through August of this year, and they experienced 1,901 cancellations for the same period.
    United Airlines recently reported during the second quarter of 1998, delays cost them $75 million and then $103 million for the same period this year, a $28 million dollar increase. Some say that the airlines are putting too many aircraft in the air in early morning and late afternoon periods, but these are the times when people need to fly.
 Page 13       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The Air Transport Association and others estimate that air traffic delays have added an estimated $2.5 billion each year to operating costs, and these delays, as I mentioned earlier, are now costing the overall economy over $4 billion.
    In a speech this past summer, Gordon Bethune, chairman of Continental Airlines, said that ''just a lousy 1 percent improvement in the air traffic control efficiency would translate into at least $200 million in savings annually in airborne and ground operations for the 10 major airlines in the United States and save Continental passengers alone nearly 1-1/2 million passenger hours.'' If we don't do something now, many are just going to give up on air travel and find other ways to get where they are going.
    I am pleased that some action is currently being taken at the request of the Air Transport Association. Administrator Garvey and other industry leaders met in August to see if there was something that could be done to come up with some short-term initiatives. There was a 21-point plan that the FAA and the airlines came up with, and I have been told recently that, as a result of these efforts, the delay situation has improved, and I want to commend Carol Hallet of the Air Transport Association and Administrator Garvey on their efforts.
    Also, I believe that if we could pass a bill out of conference that is close to the AIR-21 legislation that we could make improvements in the infrastructure and technology available to the airlines and the airports today. And I think that would be a good step forward.
    I know this is a problem where the solutions are easier said than done. It is a difficult thing. I know that some countries have privatized the air traffic control system. Some have gone to government corporations. I remember 4 and a half years ago in the early hearings that we held shortly after—a few months after I became chairman of this subcommittee, the administration put forth an air traffic control corporation proposal that met with almost total opposition.
 Page 14       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    But over the next few months I hope we can come up with some solutions to make this problem better. I think the traveling public, as I said, is going to demand it; and I hope that we can get some good suggestions from those in industry and those in government to try to do better than we have been doing over the last few months. And this hearing this morning is a start in that process.
    And I now yield to my good friend, the ranking member Mr. Lipinski.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and I thank you for holding this very timely hearing.
    As we all know, this summer was one of the worst summers on record for air traffic delays. Fortunately, Jane Garvey, the Administrator of the FAA, who I welcome here this morning, recognized there was a delay problem, discussed the problem with the air carrier industry and came up with 21 short-term solutions to the problem. The FAA's short-term solutions focused on centralized decision-making at the command center in Herndon, Virginia; increasing oversight of the use of ground stops in miles-in-trail separation restrictions; and adjusting the phase-in of new air traffic control equipment, which by the way caused many of the delays this summer.
    The FAA and the air carriers are meeting regularly to track the progress of these short-term solutions. The FAA short-term solutions will no doubt reduce delays in the near future. However, delays will only be reduced in the short term. Something needs to be done for the long term to address the delays next summer and the summer after that and the summer after that as air traffic continues to grow and grow.
    It has been suggested that the long-term solution needs to be a radical solution, such as privatizing the air traffic control system or re-regulating the aviation industry by forcing the airlines to change their schedules. Fortunately, however, there are far more practical solutions to the delay problem. In fact, AIR-21 provides the best short-term solution. By spending aviation taxes on aviation needs, AIR-21 significantly increases investment in our Nation's airports, runways and air traffic control system today so that our aviation system is ready for the increased demands of tomorrow.
 Page 15       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The recent experience of Chicago O'Hare Airport proves that increased investment in both airport infrastructure, in air traffic control equipment can significantly reduce air traffic delays. In 1988, the Chicago Delay Task Force was formed to address the significant delays at O'Hare Airport. Improvements recommended and implemented by the task force included a new air traffic control tower, a new Tricon facility, new air traffic control equipment, and airport capital improvement, such as whole pads and angled runway exits.
    As a result of these improvements, the number of delays over 15 minutes at O'Hare was reduced by 40 percent from 1980 than in 1998, despite an 11 percent increase in operations. Again, it is clear that the long-term solution to the delay problem is increased investment in our Nation's aviation system. We do not need to privatize the air traffic control system. We do not need to change the airline schedule. We simply need to pass AIR-21.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I would once again like to welcome Administrator Garvey and the other witnesses here this morning. I look forward to a very interesting amount of testimony. Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Lipinski.
    Does anyone on our side wish to make an opening statement? Mr. Isakson.
    Mr. ISAKSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I just wanted to acknowledge to the committee what I told you on the floor on Tuesday. I had the privilege of being with Administrator Garvey in Atlanta on Monday before the National Business Aviation Association annual meeting, and I want to thank her for the kind remarks about this subcommittee and its chairman and the work on AIR-21, as well as thank her for the improvements at the Hampton Center in Atlanta and the new technology that we now have there for air traffic control. They did an exemplary job at the convention, and she was very kind in her remarks about this committee and its chairman, and I wanted to welcome her and thank her for that.
 Page 16       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    We will now call on the ranking member of the full committee, our friend Mr. Oberstar.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    I want to join my compliments with those of Administrator Garvey to you and to Mr. Lipinski for the splendid job of leadership, judicious, thoughtful managing of the work of this committee and the issues in aviation.
    Today's hearing is certainly one of the most important that this committee has or has done or will undertake, because it goes to the heart of everything FAA is about—safety, separation of aircraft, managing the air traffic control system, managing the world's largest, busiest, most complex and most financially important air space.
    The temptation is to take aim and find the silver bullet in your rifle and pull the trigger and say we have found the problem and we have solved it. Those of us who have spent time in aviation know there is—well, there are very few items that are so simple, so uncomplex.
    This is one that is extraordinarily complex; and I think, in reading over the testimony last night from all the witnesses, most of the testimony reflects that complexity. Most resist the temptation to say it is you or it is that or it is this problem. If we fix that, everything is done.
    We have to address through the collaborative decision-making process that, to her great credit, Administrator Garvey has initiated, these issues on an interrelated basis, not just try to fix one thing and then we neglect something else. The airlines have participated and made constructive recommendations. The air traffic controllers have to be a part of that collaborative decision-making process. Past has to be a part of it.
    The dispatch operations of the airlines have to be a part of that process, as does the installation of the new air traffic control technology, which has been proceeding at a very dependable and predictable and responsible base.
 Page 17       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    We are going to have delay in aviation. It is going to happen. Seventy percent—50 to 70 percent of the delay is caused by weather, and we don't run weather, but we can have predictability and flexibility, and those should be the hallmarks of traffic management in the air traffic control system.
    Second reality to deal with is that 94 percent of our aviation traffic goes to 60 airports in the system. Those airports are overloaded.
    Third is the commercial reality of aviation in that there are banks of movement of aircraft morning, noon, afternoon, maybe night for freight traffic, and you can't ask one carrier to give up at a hub operation its morning bank or its evening bank, because someone else will want to move into that same space. So how do we manage that overload?
    The meeting I had with air carriers a few weeks ago, they said, we acknowledge that we are not leveling with the public. We are scheduling more flights that can possibly take off at that time, but we are managing or willing to accept that amount of delay. But it is other things that trouble the carriers, and I think the meeting that FAA and ATA members had a few weeks ago has identified the problems, developed a plan for addressing them, got the plan moving.
    There are a few things though that I would like to highlight, and one is I think that it should be an objective of FAA to harmonize all of the air traffic control weather technology. There is different equipment at different airports.
    Why is that significant? Because one weather display shows information in a very compressed fashion, which would lead air traffic controllers at centers to impose delays. Other weather displays show an expanded view of the same weather phenomenon which shows there are holes in the weather in which aircraft can come through and land. Aircraft in the air in some cases have more current information and more reliable technology to give them predictability that ground control does not have. All of these three have to be harmonized.
 Page 18       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The second is that the air traffic control system has been sort of locked in a time warp. The sequencing and spacing tools that FAA uses were developed in a time when we had radio communication only and no satellite technology. The very structure of the air traffic control system, the designation of centers and within centers, the sectors all are based on a 40-year-old technology that has not been changed to reflect current technology reality.
    When airlines dispatch centers can communicate with their aircraft wherever they are in the world and when FAA through the center at Herndon can have a picture of all of the air space in the United States and where every aircraft is at any given time, then it is time also to restructure the air space in which those aircraft move and provide straighter, cleaner simpler routes that will result in fewer restrictions on flow. That is a challenge that I lay to the FAA.
    I think you have the tools, especially with the new technology that, with the ground delay program enhancement functions, has been with the URET program able to reduce 3.2 million minutes of delay in the last year. Because you have the predictability of where aircraft are going to be 20 minutes ahead, you know what you can do to adjust the flows.
    And the third major issue is pouring more concrete and adding runway capacity, a longer term, much more difficult to do. If we get our bill passed through the Senate and through conference, Mr. Chairman, then we will be able to give airports the ability they need to conduct those functions.
    Those are the, I think, the challenges that face us—air space redesign, coordination of weather, more concrete, better training and more collaborative decision-making.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Oberstar.
    Dr. Ehlers.
 Page 19       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Just very briefly, so we can get on with the hearing, but as frequent fliers we all have some ideas as to how to solve the problem, and we understand the problem. It seems to me there are three elements that we have to have to resolve it.
    Number one is money, and that is where AIR-21 comes in, and I hope we can very soon resolve that issue. I hope everyone in this room will lobby the Senate to agree with the position of the House bill, because that will provide adequate funding.
    The second thing we need is leadership. And I watched Ms. Garvey and her leadership. I believe she can provide the leadership we need. In fact, I am confident she can. And so if we pass AIR-21 and Ms. Garvey remains there, we have those two.
    We need one other thing, and that is brains. And the jury is still out on whether the brain power is available within the FAA to handle this complex problem. They did not do well in the previous incarnations of trying to improve air traffic control, but I don't know whether the problem was the personnel or the lack of money. That remains to be seen.
    But I certainly urge everyone here to work on providing the money, the leadership, and the brains to get this job done because it has to be done.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. DeFazio.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. No, I will pass.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. LaHood.
    Mr. LAHOOD. No.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Ms. Johnson?
    Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask unanimous consent just to file my opening statement. Thank you.
 Page 20       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Everyone's statement—all statements will be placed in the record of any member who wishes to do so.
    Mr. Bass.
    Mr. BASS. No statement, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Ms. Millender-McDonald.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have no questions at this time.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Miller.
    Mr. MILLER. No, no questions.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Boswell.
    Mr. BOSWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Chairman, I am, too, pleased that you are convening this hearing today to examine this increasingly serious problem that is plaguing our system of air traffic controls.
    I continue to receive reports of delays. I get involved in delays, as others speakers have said, and so on. I am not approaching this problem with any idea of placing any blame on anybody. I want to listen, learn and examine the testimony from the hearing today. I think we need to determine what the FAA and the airlines can do to make the system run more efficiently.
    We should not do anything which tampers with our exemplary safety record for the purpose of squeezing in a few more flights in peak time. We all understand that. But I want a system that runs efficiently and safely. I do not want to make a change for the sake of change.
    As I try to walk in the shoes of those people that—those control towers and those darkened rooms, all of those screens and peak traffic time and trying to live with the pressures, if you have not been there, and I am sure that most of us here probably have been there, but maintaining that 3 mile interval and the altitude separations and so on, it is really something to think about.
 Page 21       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    And I think if we just stop and look at ourselves, Mr. Chairman, and the human factor, if you and I were sitting in there and somebody is watching us closely to check and see if we are doing it right, and if we don't do it just exactly right, be some kind of penalty or whatever, that we would probably put in low fudge factor, be a little extra cautious, I would guess that we would do that.
    So I think that that human factor has got to be looked at very carefully. I fly frequently, as the previous speakers, and I still talk to air traffic controllers in the towers and the departures and approaches as I engage in flying. I have never yet found a time when I was even suspicious that those individuals weren't doing an exemplary job. I always felt that confidence as I have been a user, and the last time I was a user was Monday. And I feel that confidence.
    They want to do a good job. I have no doubt about it. And so now the question is, can we give them the tools?
    Vern, I think we have the brain power. I think it is there. I think Ms. Garvey has got the brain power. Does she have the tools in her tool box to get the job done? And I guess that would include money and whatever resources needed.
    So I would like for us to make comment, maybe I have to question about it, but when the testimony is given, you know, what about the pressures on the individuals that are sitting there watching that screen and having that communication and keeping those separations and altitude separations—and all of us probably don't realize that if there is—in space where there is VFR traffic that at 500 feet, they are between odd plus 5 or even plus 5, depending on the direction they are going, and then, of course, the IFR is at even odd thousand depending on the direction, and then we change at flight level 18,000, I know it is a pretty complicated system.
    But, you know, we have got excellent people out there; and I am very confident if we give them the right tools they will do the job, and I would hope that we would keep that in mind as we have these discussions. And I agree with other speakers, if we just get AIR-21 passed, we will move forward.
 Page 22       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Boswell.
    Mr. Sherwood.
    Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I like everybody else am here just to hear our FAA administrator, Ms. Garvey, tell us what we need to do to help move air transport into the 21st century. I am anxious to hear what we have to say today.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Baldacci.
    Mr. BALDACCI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding the regional hearings with Representative Bass and myself in Nashua and Bangor, Maine, and for taking the initiative to get out into the field to see what is going on to be able to bring that perspective to Washington.
    I want to compliment Ms. Garvey for her leadership at FAA, but at the same time a lot of work needs to be done, and we need to move the FAA into the 21st century because of the tremendous increase in aviation that has taken place and to also recognize that all of America has not received the rising tide that raises all ships and that we need to work in rural areas to make sure that they have the same level of access that major urban areas do.
    So, Mr. Chairman, I have longer remarks which I will enter into the record, but I appreciate again your leadership and the leadership of our ranking member and the committee, thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. LoBiondo.
    Mr. LOBIONDO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I would like to join with you and other members of the committee in welcoming Ms. Garvey today. New Jersey's 2nd congressional district is a proud home of the FAA technical center that does great work; and, Ms. Garvey, I want to thank you for all the attention you are paying to our issues.
 Page 23       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. McGovern.
    Mr. MCGOVERN. Mr. Chairman, I will submit my statement in the record. But I want to welcome Ms. Garvey to the panel today and remind her about Worcester Airport.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Mica.
    Mr. MICA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    They used to say there is two things certain in life, death and taxes. I think there are now three things certain in life, death, taxes and delays in air travel in the United States. I am very concerned about what I have seen as a member of this committee since 1993 on the full committee, on the aviation subcommittee. The software in our air traffic control centers was designed in the 1950s, installed in the 1960s, and became obsolete in the 1970s.
    I came on to this committee and we heard stories about our air traffic control system equipment was going to be improved, was going to be improved, was on its way, and here we are almost at the turn of the millennium, we spent billions of dollars, and we still don't have modern equipment in place.
    I know many of the delays are due to weather and we have some natural circumstances that are beyond our control, but we still do not have modern equipment and technology for our air control system in place, and we have been promised that since I came on this committee in 1993.
    So I am anxious to hear what some of our aviation administrators and agency personnel have done to see that that equipment that can help us particularly with bad weather and with the increasing traffic that we have do a better job in serving the public and cutting down these delays.
 Page 24       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    So I thank you. I think this is very timely and very appropriate.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Mica.
    Mr. Lampson.
    Mr. LAMPSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Just a quick statement first to thank you for calling the hearing and welcome Ms. Garvey and our other panelists that we will be hearing from.
    I am particularly interested in comments as it pertains to regional airports and as there is more demand for travel to and from remote areas is that going to create a bigger problem or it is going to become a part of the solution?
    So thank you for coming, and we look forward to the comments today.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Lampson. Dr. Cooksey.
    Mr. COOKSEY. It is always great to have Mrs. Garvey here and the people from the FAA, and I see there is someone here from the ATA and ALPA, several. It should be an interesting meeting.
    I would say that it is amazing that the air traffic controllers and the FAA moves as many people around this country as safely as they do. And if there is a problem, and I think it is acknowledged that there is a problem in not having stated our equivalent, but part of the fault lies at the feet of the politicians who have made a decision to take money from the aviation trust fund. That is the reason I feel very strongly that AIR-21 is a good program, and we should put that money that the airline passengers are paying in taxes every time they buy a ticket into funds to buy this state-of-the-art equipment.
    So you know we have got some responsibility, too, if there is a lack of funding for equipment. I am looking forward to hearing your testimony.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Dr. Cooksey. Ms. Danner.
 Page 25       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. DANNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Good morning, Jane, how are you? Recently I invited you to Kansas City, and you joined me for a barbecue in Kansas City. And since this offer is made in the open, it can't be considered a bribe. But I do happen to have some Kansas City barbecue in my office. If you are here at lunchtime, please stop by. It is in this building, very, very convenient.
    Sometime ago I was having a conversation with the CEO of one of our major airlines, and he indicated that he felt that they had a great deal of knowledge that they would like to share with the FAA but that the FAA did not seem very receptive to receiving it. And so my only comment this morning, so that I can be brief and you can be heard, is that I would hope that maybe you would initiate a meeting with the CEOs of the various airlines yourself. And perhaps you are already doing that, and that has happened since he and I had this conversation, but if it hasn't, I would suggest—after all, these are all individuals who know quite a lot about not only the airlines but the air traffic controls and delays, and if you can have a dialogue with them, I think we would all benefit.
    It is good to have you with us, and come back to Kansas City.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Ms. Danner. Mr. Holden.
    Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have no statement.
    Mr. DUNCAN. All right. Thank you very much.
    We will now start with the witnesses. I want to, first of all, welcome all of the witnesses who are here to testify and thank each of them for taking time out from what I know are very busy schedules to be here with us this morning.
    Our first witness will be the Honorable Jane Garvey, the Administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration. And, Ms. Garvey, you may begin your statement.

TESTIMONY OF HON. JANE F. GARVEY, ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION
 Page 26       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  

    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you very much.
    Chairman Duncan, Congressman Lipinski, Members of the Subcommittee, I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. I know this is a very important issue to the Committee—it certainly is an important issue to the airlines, and we know it creates understandable frustration for the passengers.
    The issue of delays, as some of you have already suggested, is very complex. What I would like to do this morning as briefly as I can, is to touch on some of those complexities and also talk a little bit about both the long and short term solutions that we envision.
    There are, as you have indicated, many conditions that cause delays—bad weather, inoperable runways, airport capacity limitations, aircraft equipment problems, maintenance and crew problems and, yes, air traffic equipment outages and air traffic procedures. All contribute to the issue of delays.
    We need to say at the outset that delays will never be eliminated. Our challenge, our job at the FAA is to work to minimize those delays to the greatest extent possible without compromising safety, and we need to underscore that, without compromising safety.
    I will acknowledge at the outset that, in the past, the FAA has been criticized, with some justification, for not fully appreciating the total reliance of airlines on air traffic control. No other industry is as totally dependent on Federal Government action to produce a product. Airlines have said to us, 'Look, we are relying on your efforts, and we need to be thought of more as customers, rather than users of the system.'
    Last summer, again as you have indicated, we saw a significant increase in delays. At the request of the airlines, the FAA, in conjunction with the Air Transport Association and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, conducted an evaluation that focused on national system operations and efficiencies rather than the operation of any single facility. I want to underscore that. We have had lots of conversations with the airlines in the past, but we have, I think, focused more on individual facilities.
 Page 27       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    What we did at this point, at this juncture, was really to take a step back and say let us look at the entire system. We identified a number of action items. It was a very hard look for us at the FAA, but we were, I think, rightfully self-critical and identified some actions, and we are moving out on all of those action items.
    In a separate initiative, on August 5th and 6th, we met with senior airline executives. We met with representatives of ATA and the Regional Airline Association and, again, representatives of NATCA. We again asked everyone in the room to take off their individual airline hat, to take off their individual agency hat and to take, again, a look at the system.
    As Congressman Lipinski mentioned, we did jointly develop 21 initiatives, 13 of which have been fully implemented today, and the others are well on their way. As a result of those initiatives, the command center is now playing an even greater role in air traffic management policymaking and dissemination of information.
    For example, all of the local ground stops that exceed 15 minutes must be coordinated with the command center and are limited to 30 minutes in duration. Local facilities cannot extend ground stops beyond 30 minutes without the express authorization of the command center.
    Also a 30-mile in-trail limit was agreed to, that is something we heard about from the airlines, along with guidelines for requests to exceed the 30-mile in-trail limit.
    Another example of the more focused central role being played by the command center is the daily report being issued every single day on the previous day's traffic statistics. In the interest of better communication, we are sharing that report with the airlines. We fax it, as a matter of fact, to all of the CEOs every day. I take a look at it. It is a good tool, I think, to help us both understand and communicate what is happening.
    But just to highlight and just to mention how complicated is the role that we are asking the command center to play, let me say that the airlines often have very different views and very different ideas about what they would like the FAA to do in terms of air traffic management. In part, this is attributable to the fact that each airline has very different schedules, and each airline often operates their flights differently. That translates into different views of what procedures should be put in place. I think one of the great challenges for all of those wonderful people at the command center is to sort through all of those issues, to communicate with people and then in the final analysis to do what is best for the system and to do it in a fair and equitable manner.
 Page 28       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The command center also conducts two daily telephone conferences with the en route centers and with the airline operations personnel to discuss the state of the system and possible tactical strategies to deal with the constraints on the systems. The airline operations folks have been terrific about communicating quite directly and quite clearly what some of their concerns are and what some of their suggestions might be.
    If severe weather develops, as, by the way, it did yesterday, it impacts the operation. Then additional teleconferences are initiated.
    The FAA has also asked ATA to provide representatives who work with us side by side at the command center. ATA has been terrific about providing those representatives, and their participation helps foster effective, real-time communication between our air traffic management and their member airlines. So if there is one important point, it is the communication that is taking place. I think that is really important and gets, Congresswoman, to the point you mentioned.
    But I do want to say that while I am satisfied that the FAA is stepping up to the plate and I could not be more complimentary of both the controllers and the managers who have really stepped up and said, 'How can we solve some of these problems?' I do want to say that we have some real challenges in both the short and the long term, and some of you have touched on them. For example, regional jets, which offer just a wonderful opportunity for better service and more competition, but they also create some real challenges in terms of the mix of fleet.
    And, again, I am very appreciative to the airlines and to people like Walt Coleman and to the engineers at Mitre who are helping us work through a number of these issues.
    A further factor that complicates air traffic control is that of airline scheduling and airport capacity. The FAA clearly, clearly has an important role to play in the reduction of airline delays, but, as so many of you have suggested, this really take a multifaceted issue; and because it is, it will really make a multifaceted solution. That means all of us stepping up to the plate and all of us accepting shared responsibility.
 Page 29       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I think we will see and are seeing some real progress in the area where all three of us are working very closely together; that is, the airlines, airports and the FAA.
    We know that the whole issue, as Congressman Oberstar mentioned, the whole issue of airport capacity is a very difficult one, and sometimes one that is very politically sensitive. When they are discussing new runways or new terminals, we know that that debate in local communities is often very intense and very emotional. While we are busy working on modernizing the air traffic control system, we also know that the landside issues and the groundside issues are very complicated ones and ones that the airports need to wrestle through as well.
    FAA's longer term role, and one in which we are currently engaged, is remaking the system for a new era, and again so many of you have touched on that important issue. The effort includes redesign of the National Air Space, air traffic control modernization and air traffic control reform that ensures that air traffic can run much more like a business.
    In terms of the air space, the more congested and complicated air space in our system is east of the Mississippi River. Our redesign includes analysis of the en route air traffic control centers that feed traffic into this area, namely, the centers in Boston, Washington, Miami and Chicago, and that, because it is so congested, is really the focus of our initial efforts.
    Our modernization efforts are essentially divided into three categories; each one is very, very important.
    The first category is to sustain our current system by replacing the aging equipment and renewing the infrastructure. The DSR event that we had earlier this week in Atlanta and in Nashville a while ago, that is part of the sustaining of the system.
    The second category is the safety features that Congressman Oberstar spoke about. It is adding some of the weather features that will give us much more accurate weather information.
 Page 30       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
     The third category, equally important, are system capacity and efficiency improvements, and that is where Free Flight Phase I comes into play.
    Taken as a whole, again, taken in total, modernization will improve the controller's ability to manage increasing levels of traffic.
    We have had an opportunity to appear before this Committee and to talk about our incremental approach to modernization. Benchmark by benchmark, step by step, incremental is the approach that we are taking. We appreciate very, very much the great support that we have received from this Committee in that approach to modernization that we are taking.
    Let me just conclude by saying I know this is a very critical time for us at the FAA. We very much appreciate the efforts of this Committee to move forward on the issue of the FAA reauthorization.
    I want to once again, as I have in the past, emphasize the Administration's commitment to air traffic control reform. We remain committed to the principles of air traffic control reform and the principles that we think were so eloquently stated in both Congressman Mineta's report and also Governor Baliles' report. But I also know that I speak for the Secretary when I say that we are committed to those principles, but we are also very committed to working with this Committee. We know these issues are extraordinarily important to all of us, and we look forward to those discussions and the debate, if you will.
    I will conclude my statement at this time and just say once again that we appreciate both the opportunity to be here, and I look forward to hearing the testimony of the other members of the panel today.
    Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you very much, Administrator Garvey, for a very fine statement.
    I am going to yield my time for questions to Congressman Ehlers at this point.
 Page 31       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and thank you, Administrator Garvey, for your testimony. As I commented earlier, obviously an important part of this job is good leadership and having sufficient resources to do the job, and I commend you for your leadership.
    I also recognize it is not our job to tell you what to do, but we certainly feel free to advise you. And I recall when you first got the job, I advised you that if you didn't spend a third of your time solving your Y2K problem, you would get in trouble. I appreciate the attention you paid to that problem, and I think it is largely resolved.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you.
    Mr. EHLERS. At this point I would suggest that if you don't spend a third of your time on resolving air traffic control problems, we are going to be in real trouble.
    I mentioned the need for good equipment and good personnel, and this struck me again just several weeks ago. I was in a flight, and we suddenly had a ground delay of 15 minutes because air traffic control went down. I found it hard to imagine how air traffic control could go down, so I checked into it afterwards. It turned out to be a personnel mistake and coupled with an equipment failure.
    We simply can't have that. You have got a 15-minute delay in a major airport, totally disrupts the system for a long time. And we have to make sure we have personnel who understand the system but reliable systems as well, that with backup that they can handle situations like that.
    I will say in your statement—I was very pleased that your emphasis on listening to the users, that is extremely important, even on the little things.
    Just a few weeks ago I was flying, and I talked to one of the pilots, and he was commenting about your frustration. And he was put on hold for an hour the day before and not once did he receive any explanation of what the reason was and could not get good estimates about the amount of time it would last. And he said, why can't they just tell me these things so I can let the passengers know? Everyone feels better about it.
 Page 32       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    So I think communication with the users is very important, but even in the little things, even in the daily operations.
    My questions for you are what improvements are coming down the pipe in terms of automated control, which will communicate directly between your computers and the airplanes communities and thereby relieve the flight controllers of some of the burden of communicating with the plane? And what will be included in the automatic communication and control from your system to the aircraft system?
    And the second question is, how are we coming along on the so-called free flight which I think will result in economic savings, fuel savings and time savings?
    Ms. GARVEY. Let me start with the second question about Free Flight. We have very good news in that area, we have put in place a pretty aggressive schedule on Free Flight Phase I. I think there are two key ingredients: One, we have a terrific program manager, but the second part again is the consensus that we have arrived at with industry. Industry is very much a part of this. ATA and the individual airlines are working with us on Free Flight Phase I, and I think, because that consensus is holding, we are able very much to stick to our schedule.
    The schedule that we have outlined about putting some of the automation tools in place by 2002 is holding. We have seen some wonderful results today, the collaborative decision-making, but again with the committee I referred to a little bit earlier, we have saved about 3.2 million minutes of delay since September of 1998. That is very good news. One carrier mentioned the other day that they had saved about $19 million because of a collaborative decision-making tool in a given year at a very, very busy airport, so that is good news.
    We are on schedule and on track, but again, we are going to get some bumps in the road with it. But I think we are talking with our customers. The controllers are very much a part of it. They are a part of the team. These are tools that they need to feel comfortable with. So having them part of that, both the development of the tools and also the testing of them is very critical. It is really with those automation tools that gets to your first question: those are the tools that are going to help us directly communicate between the air traffic controllers, the pilot and the dispatchers. Those are really critical tools for us.
 Page 33       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    One other point on it: we have a very simple but I think an important contract with industry on this, and the contract is this: We will deploy the tools, but industry needs to help tell us what is working and what is not working. They are going to help us measure those results, put some performance measures in place so we know we are really getting what we want out of it. I am very pleased with this agreement.
    Our next challenge is moving on to Free Flight Phase II. We are doing that.
    Mr. EHLERS. Thank you.
    And one last question, how are we coming along in having the cargo aircraft meet the same requirements as passenger aircraft, for example, the running system when you are getting there in another aircraft and so forth?
    Ms. GARVEY. Right. The collision avoidance system, we are in the final stages of doing a rulemaking on collision avoidance. I know that is something that Congressman Lipinski has been very interested in as well, and I see my colleague and friend Duane here from the Pilots Association. That is something that they care about as well. So we are in the final stages of that. We have got a lot of very good comments both from this Committee and also from the Pilots Association.
    Mr. EHLERS. All right. Thank you very much.
    I yield back the balance of my time.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Ehlers.
    Mr. Oberstar.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and, Mrs. Garvey, thank you very much for your excellent testimony.
    I think in your delivered remarks you passed over a very important message there, your written prepared testimony on page 5, and it is important to keep this in mind that—you in fact say that it is important to keep in mind that, while our work with the carriers is important, air carrier operations represent less than half of the air traffic workload.
 Page 34       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    A lot of folks just think that the only things up there in the skies are the airlines. Of course, passengers think that they are the only ones that count, getting on board these planes. They don't think about the other factors that impinge upon the workload or that are a part of the workload of air traffic controllers, and that is general aviation, military carriers, business jets, and a factor that you cite later in your testimony, the impact of regional airlines.
    The enormous growth that is the phenomenon of today is the extraordinary growth in regional airline service in the age of hub and spoke service, and that the air traffic controller who has to separate traffic, keep the system safe, has to account for propeller aircraft that are moving from a small airport to a hub, for regional jets, both of which move at a slower speed than the commercial jets, and has to maintain separation, that is an extraordinary challenge.
    And the system can—if all aircraft moved at the same speed, if all were the identical aircraft, your task would be somewhat lessened. But it is not just 22,000 air carrier movements a day in the air space, it is 70 to 90,000 departures a day that have to—traffic that has to be worked, both IFR and VFR traffic.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. I think you understated somewhat the complexity of what you are dealing with.
    Dr. Ehlers has left, but he asked about free flights. I suggest to him that he get on the mailing list to receive the Free Flight Phase I status report that is put out monthly by your office. And I want to compliment Mr. Keegan, who is the director of free flight programs. He is doing an excellent job reporting on every one of the aspects of free flight, which means something different than the public understands by it. The public thinks free flight means you get on a plane and fly where you want at the time you want at any altitude you want. That is not free flight.
 Page 35       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    What I am very delighted with is the reports on collaborative decision-making and the user-requested evaluation tool, which is—I went back and just checked on something I said 12 years ago in the early phase of the NAS plan, that the technology being developed will enable controllers to predict trajectories of aircraft 20 minutes ahead in their flight, not just 30 or 40 seconds or a minute ahead, and now we have it.
    You have got this—you have got to install it, and the two test centers, Indianapolis and Memphis, are using URET and the trajectory projection ability to guide aircraft and maintain separation. But 90 miles clearly is too much in certain circumstances; 3 miles may be too dangerous in others.
    And it is on approach where we have the biggest challenge to the air traffic system. You don't want the following aircraft caught up in the vortex of the leading aircraft. You have already had enough flights in the terrain because of wake vortex problems and a very recent one in the military that had a severe crash because the aircraft got caught in the vortex of the aircraft just ahead of it.
    You said administration believes Congress should replace the financing mechanism and excise tax and airline passengers with a system in which the actual commercial users pay for the services based on the costs of the services, and you cite the NCARC commission and others. I think that is an extremely difficult challenge.
    My former colleague Bill Clinger and I spent a lot of time with the Bush OMB and I spent time with the Clinton OMB trying to understand what does it cost in a user-based system; and neither OMB, the previous one or this one, has been able to define what is a user fee, a fee that is directly related to the service provided.
    I want to know how you are going to do this. You are just the messenger here, but you are delivering that message. And I have been not only skeptical of it but in disagreement with it.
 Page 36       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, I will give this a good shot here now, Congressman. Stay with me on this.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. I AM WITH YOU ALL THE WAY.
    Ms. GARVEY. First of all, let me say at the outset, it is complicated. From my perspective and I think from where we sit at the FAA, the first step and the most important step is getting the cost accounting system in place. So I think you are right. You almost can't answer that question until you have a solid cost accounting system that we all understand.     I think we are making very good progress on that. We had a terrific session in July with the industry. We are focused on understanding the costs within our air traffic control system, and in particular the areas of en route and the oceanic. I think we have a much better handle on what some of those costs are.
    We have got a pretty aggressive series of benchmarks in order to really get the data we need and we are working closely with the IG.
    From our perspective, I think in order to answer your question more fully and in order to answer it in the best possible way, we have got to have a good solid cost accounting system. We are on our way, but we are not there yet.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. That is fair. You have reflected the complexity of the challenge ahead of us.
    Mr. Chairman, just one other question. I know there may be an opportunity for other questions later—and I will await my second round—but the airspace redesign you touched on and which I sketched in my opening comments, I think that is the biggest challenge facing the FAA. With all the new technology that is coming on stream, and by the way, parenthetically, I bridle every time I hear ancient, outdated, outmoded equipment. Of the 57,000 pieces of technology in the airspace redesign, I mean in the technology system redesign, 47,000 pieces are in place. One of the more complicated ones, stars, is yet to come. Raytheon better stay on track on that.
 Page 37       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    But with all that new technology, we really do have to rethink the airspace. You are going to have to bring the controllers and PASS and the airlines on board to do that, because we really are managing an airspace that was designed when traffic was moved with radios and with ground locator beacons. We are in a different era now. The airspace structure today does not reflect today's and the coming technology.
    Ms. GARVEY. I couldn't agree more. We have five projects that we are managing very closely out of the Administrator's office, and, frankly, that is one of them, because it is so challenging and so complex. I was very interested in your opening statement comments about the historic view of how we tracked aircraft and the routing and so forth. I think that is something we have to be very careful that we are not just retreating to those ideas and we are taking into account all of the new technology.
    It is also complicated, obviously, by some of the community issues. We have had a series of meetings going on in the New York area, and communities care deeply about this. How do you look at the system and deal with it in an equitable way, but also know that there are community issues as well? I think you are right, it is going to be very complicated.
    We don't have all the answers, and we are going to have to bring in some very good outside folks to help us with this and see it through. But I think that is also an area where we are going to have to look at it incrementally. Focusing on the congested area is the right thing, the first step. Other regions are also beginning their efforts, but I think from the national perspective, focusing on that eastern triangle, if you will, is the right place to start.
    Thank you, by the way, too, for mentioning the hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment that have gone in. That I think is an important point to mention as well. Thank you.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. I am very impressed with your work. Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Oberstar. Mr. LaHood.
 Page 38       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. LAHOOD. Ms. Garvey, I have a letter from a constituent, a former constituent. I wonder if I could give it to you and you would take a look at it. He makes reference to some decisions you have made about pay. I wonder if you could communicate with him directly.
    Ms. GARVEY. I would be happy to do that.
    Mr. LAHOOD. I appreciate that very much. I will give it to you upon the conclusion of this.
    Have you had a chance to review the T-21 bill that was passed in the House?
    Ms. GARVEY. I have had a little bit of a chance, probably not nearly as directly as I did when I was in highways and was involved in some of the early discussions, but certainly enough from talking with the Secretary and talking with some of my colleagues from Federal Highways.
    Mr. LAHOOD. I guess what I meant was the bill that we passed, the FAA bill that we passed.
    Ms. GARVEY. AIR-21, I am sorry.
    Mr. LAHOOD. I said T-21. I am sorry.
    Ms. GARVEY. I thought you were being very intramodal there. We have had a chance to look at that, and to actually look at it in some detail. Then we did kind of an interesting exercise, in which we laid out both the AIR-21 and the Administration's proposal and Senate's proposal and then tracked some of the themes. I think a number of the themes that are included in AIR-21 track very well with some of the reform proposals that we have talked about: the inclusion of a COO, the inclusion of an Oversight Committee are important principles for us.
    Mr. LAHOOD. Can I assume that you would recommend the President sign the bill if it is similar to what the Senate passes, if the Senate passes a similar bill?
 Page 39       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. What continues to be an issue for us and why we are so eager to engage in the discussion with this Committee and the Senate is the budget treatment proposed in the House bill. I know that the Administration has gone on record both in front of this Committee and also with individual Mmbers to say that we have some concerns about the off-budget proposal. But I remain absolutely optimistic that there is enough room for discussion and working through, and I certainly was impressed with seeing how both this Committee and Secretary Slater were able to work through some of the issues on TEA-21. So I remain optimistic that we can do that here. These are tough issues and important ones, and we are eager to have those conversations with you.
    Mr. LAHOOD. Do you favor lifting the slots at the slotted airports?
    Ms. GARVEY. I would stand with the Administration obviously on that. At the FAA our focus is safety. If that occurs, we would move those planes efficiently and obviously in the safest manner possible. I know the Secretary's office has proposed some lifting of the slots.
    Mr. LAHOOD. Can you just say if you have any update or report on a third airport in Chicago. Have you been working on that at all or talking to people in the region?
    Ms. GARVEY. Congressman, we certainly had some meetings awhile ago, and I know staff has been working that issue through very closely with the Illinois DOT. I would like to get back with even more up-to-date information, but I know that the last discussions included a more scaled down version that the Illinois DOT was providing some additional information on. I can get back to you with a little bit more specificity. It has been a couple of months since I looked at that, but I am going to do that.
    Mr. LAHOOD. Let me just say too that my hometown is Peoria, so I fly to Chicago just about every weekend, and I am one of those that is absolutely amazed at how well the air traffic control system does work.
 Page 40       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you.
    Mr. LAHOOD. When I fly into O'Hare and see all of the people flying in and out of there, in what I believe is generally a fairly efficient operation, and I know, anytime a storm moves in over Lake Michigan, and it happens quite often, things get delayed and there are slowdowns. But I generally believe that we have one of the most efficient systems, as reflected at O'Hare International Airport, and I just think people should be a little more appreciative and gratified at the system that we do have, when you figure all of the people that are moving through the air and through that part of the country in what I believe is a fairly efficient and effective way.
    I think many of the problems that cause delays at O'Hare particularly have a lot more to do with weather than they do with anything else. Obviously, no one has control over that, and I think all of us that fly do appreciate the fact that safety considerations have to be taken into consideration when weather does move into an area like Chicago.
    So I just want to say that I appreciate the work that the FAA does. I appreciate the work that air traffic controllers do in making sure that these planes come in and out safely; and I think, for the most part, it is an awfully efficient system. We all have complaints about these matters and hear complaints about them; but overall I think it is a very, very efficient system and works very well, and I think the flying public ought to be assured that when decisions are made, they are made for safety reasons.
    So that probably is a little different opinion than perhaps others have here, but for anyone who flies as often as we do in and out of O'Hare, I appreciate the many good people who do keep things moving in a very efficient way.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for being here.
    Ms. GARVEY. Congressman, thank you very much for those kind words. I think we have an extraordinary workforce and wonderfully talented, the best in the world, people managing these aircraft. I am very pleased to hear you say that. Thank you.
 Page 41       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. DeFazio.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Garvey, good to see you again. Have you got that schedule set for New Year's Eve?
    Ms. GARVEY. I do. I still remember you saying you would be home revving up your generator.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Bonneville power Administration has made some strides in the intervening period. I might not be, but I am still ready.
    Ms. GARVEY. We still have a place for you on the plane.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. I have a couple of questions. I started making some inquiries last summer after some unusual patterns of delay which I observed as a passenger, very lengthy ground holds to be rerouted in a sector which was some 400 or 500 miles from my departure. That seemed unusual. I had never experienced that in 13 years and 2 million miles.
    So I got your national air traffic management evaluation report which, as I told some of your folks I met with, it was not particularly user friendly; and they said it wasn't supposed to be, it was for internal use. But I kind of got through it and some of the acronyms.
    But I thought the number one recommendation—and I am not sure whether you are telling us in your testimony you addressed it or not—the number one problem, they said, was that the ATCSCC was delegated the authority only to direct traffic management initiatives. They should also be delegated the authority to implement air traffic restrictions in severe weather avoidance plans, reroutes. Then the team recommends, number one, develop a policy that delegates to the ATCSCC the authority to direct and implement traffic management initiatives.
    You talked about the enhanced role of the command center. So have you fully implemented that now? Is that now centrally coordinated, or are the on-route centers still kind of free agents?
 Page 42       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, it is centrally coordinated. I want to, as I say that, also mention the information that local or regional facilities have is also critical and important, and I think the important message that we are communicating is that there needs to be coordination between that, when it has a national, when it has a national implication, the ultimate responsibility resting with the Command Center.
    But it is obviously based on a lot of communication, because those local folks see it up close and personal. They know what is going on. We think the kinds of clarification we have given to the role of Herndon is very important and very critical.
    I want to tell you that we are going to have to keep working it. There are times when I would bet the Command Center would say, 'You know, we should have made that call and we are going to have to keep working it.' That is why the twice-a-day conversations, both with the airlines and our own communication among facilities and the Command Center, is so critical and so important. But I think we have made tremendous strides in that area, and I think it is very clear to people what our intention is.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. So these are new measures, this thing about ground stops and the duration of those.
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct, Congressman, yes.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Now, you have customers, a lot of customers. You have got customers that are non-passenger aviation, you have got customers that are passenger aviation, you have customers who are customers of those, and you are controlling a public resource.
    At what point do we begin to say, well, there has got to be some uniformity here? I mean, you described something to me which sounds inherent in causing problems. Some airlines want ground holds, some airlines prefer to circle in the air. Other airlines want other alternatives.
 Page 43       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    At what point do we just say look, we are dealing with a limited public resource here and particularly in the congested areas, we are just going to have some uniform procedures?
    I thought for some time we had pretty much moved to uniform ground holds as opposed to air traffic on route delays, but perhaps I was mistaken in that. That seems to me something that you are going to have to deal with.
    Also airline scheduling. We've talked about free flight. That is great and I think there is a lot of promise there, but you are still confronted with the laws of physics, with one plane occupying one space at one time, particularly on the ground. It seems that the ground problems where airlines are sometimes scheduling an impossible number of departures, they exceed any potential operational capability on the ground. That is also a problem. I don't know whether that is a free market thing where the airlines schedule more things that are physically possible to fool their customers, or whether we should also be excerpting some authorities in those areas. If you could comment on that.
    Ms. GARVEY. Let me start with the first one, because that is a really good question and also a difficult question, at what point, how do you find that right balance between giving the airlines enough flexibility so that we are responding to individual needs, but then also looking at the system as a whole.
    That is where the Command Center really has to play a very key role, and it is a real challenge. I mean, we want to be as flexible as we possibly can. We want to also, though, optimize the system, and we want to do it obviously in the safest and the most efficient manner. It is a constant issue, and it is one we have to keep looking at. I would not want us to see us move to such uniformity that we are not able to be flexible enough. So I think we just need to keep working that issue and keep those lines of communication open.
    Your point about the scheduling is well taken. There are some laws of physics that come into play there. I will say, and I certainly don't know the competition issues nearly as well as the airlines do, but in speaking with the individual CEOs and speaking with the operational people, I have heard many of them saying, 'Look, we are going to take a hard look at our own policies and our own procedures,' and I think that is occurring in some places; and I would say hats off to them for that, because that is the right thing to do.
 Page 44       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    When I attended those August meetings, and I was very impressed with the openness with which those operational folks from all the airlines came to those meetings, to say, 'Look, we just want to figure this out.' We have got some competition issues. We have some market issues that we have to deal with, but we also want to figure this out with you.
    In some cases the airlines are already doing that. In other cases, perhaps being a little more self-critical look would be helpful. But I would expect they will get there.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. One more quick question, Mr. Chairman, if you would.
    Ms. Garvey, just in terms of, say, allocation of when you get to limited operations at an airport, is it true at that point basically a lot of discretion is given to the airlines? For example at San Francisco. It is low ceilings; we are down to one runway, as we often are. The airlines at that point have a certain—the slots are kind of allocated to them under flow control; is that correct?
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. They make operational decisions on which planes are going to operate, not operate.
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct. There is a certain degree of flexibility in the collaborative decision-making, and it gives more flexibility. What we have to be constantly mindful of—and I know the operations people of the airlines are as well—is the whole issue of safety. We don't want to release anyone or allow for movement if we think it is really unsafe. But there is a certain degree of flexibility. The airlines might say they would like more flexibility, but I think that is something we keep working on.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. What I am confronted with—I have to get parochial at one point in my questioning here—living in Eugene, where United has scheduled 6 or 7 flights a day into San Francisco, we often will find throughout the winter months, those are essentially nonscheduled. Basically, it seems like Eugene is at the end of their priority list, and they keep denying it. But in fact the airlines are given so many slots, and they decide which airplanes are going to fly and which aren't, basically.
 Page 45       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    So at some point, I just want to make sure that the responsibility is clear. Yes, there is a weather problem, but the second level of the problem is that the airline management has made a decision that this city is a particularly low priority and the people should sit on the ground. But they will always blame it on air traffic and weather.
    It seems when we get to disclosure we are going to need two levels here. One is, yes, there is a weather problem; but the second is the airline has some discretion here, and they have decided that you should sit there while someone else goes.
    In fact I missed a day of my vacation this year to Europe because I was on a flight that got rerouted to Baltimore and missed my connecting flight because my earlier flight, which would have been a high-priority flight, was canceled because of mechanical problems, and United put me on a domestic flight which wasn't connecting; then they brought in international flights which left while I was in the air, and they had me circling over Ohio, and they tried to deny any responsibility. I said no, that was your discretion.
    So for passengers, there are a couple of levels here. One is, yes, there are problems with the system; there are problems with the weather. But the second is the airlines have some responsibility in the matter too.
    Ms. GARVEY. I think, Congressman, you have pointed up once again this is really a multifaceted issue. We are in it together and have to figure it out together.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Bass.
    Mr. BASS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I will just start by saying I hope as a matter of process that you can begin enforcing the 5-minute rule. Otherwise, it is going to be 4 or 5 o'clock before Mrs. Garvey can get back on the job.
    I want to thank you very much for coming here today. I also wants to thank you for the participation of the FAA in the hearing we held in New Hampshire on Monday, as I also want to thank the Chairman of our subcommittee for arranging for the hearing to occur. It was a very helpful forum, and I think it was good for the center and so on.
 Page 46       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I have a series of questions, and I will ask them, if I can, fairly quickly. Are there any tubes left in any of the equipment?
    Ms. GARVEY. No more tubes.
    Mr. BASS. Are you ready for Y2K?
    Ms. GARVEY. We are ready, Congressman. In fact, I will be flying.
    Mr. BASS. Wonderful. I understand that you have established this daily reporting system nationally, which I think is a very good idea. Has it been going long enough so you can develop trends that are helpful in dealing with specific problems in specific areas?
    Ms. GARVEY. You know, I would have to defer. Let me ask staff. I am reading them every day. There are some areas where I know we have focused a little bit.
    Mr. BASS. How long has this been going on?
    Ms. GARVEY. We have really been doing it since those August meetings. The end of August.
    Mr. BASS. So it will take a little while. That is very good. If you have this daily stuff and get it in the computer, you will see trends as they develop and that will be helpful. Focusing on the national, when you do this, you will see there are areas that are problematic. Newark, for example is a big problem. Continental has complained that lots of flights have been delayed. I am not going to ask you to respond to Newark, because I think the process of putting this data together will give us more empirical information.
    One of the major problems in scheduling is the fact that the airlines are really in charge of putting together the process of demand. Do you think the FAA should work more closely with the airlines or perhaps have some overall control over the process of airline scheduling?
 Page 47       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. I think we have such a big job with the whole issue of safety, and certainly deregulation freed up the market in many ways. I think our focus should be and continue to be safety. Whether or not DOT wants to play more of a role, I would defer to them. But I think from our perspective, focusing on the safety pieces is really critical.
    We have had some pretty straight conversations with the airlines about some of the scheduling issues. I was just speaking of Newark, I meet with Continental and our folks from Newark once every 3 or 4 months; and, you know, a number of issues are talked about quite openly and quite candidly. But I think I will stay with our safety mission and focus on those issues.
    Mr. BASS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Ms. GARVEY.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you. Mrs. Johnson.
    Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Garvey, you spoke of the redesign. Can you tell me what the progress of that is? How long it will take and why it will take so long?
    Ms. GARVEY. It is an enormous undertaking, and I hesitate always to even tell you how long, because I know I feel a sense of frustration about it. In total it is probably an 8-year process; but I want to be honest about it, because it is very, very complicated. As I mentioned earlier, it has enormous community impacts.
    However, having said that, the way we are approaching it is to try to put in place some very specific early benchmarks. We are focusing initially, as I mentioned, on the eastern triangle. We are very focused right now on a series of meetings we are having in this area and we hope that by next summer we will have a series of options that we can model and take a look at after which we would go back out both to Congress and to some of the affected communities as well.
 Page 48       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    We will put in place some earlier benchmarks, but the overall effort is a very, very ambitious and a long time process.
    Ms. JOHNSON. As you go into this redesign, there will be increasing demands on additional flights. Will that have impact or will they be—.
    Ms. GARVEY. I think you are absolutely right. You are absolutely right, Congresswoman. For example eight hundred the regional jets that Congressman Oberstar spoke about, that certainly is going to have an implication, and as we look at these issues, we have got to take that into account. We don't fully know all the answers in those cases and we have to really sort that out with our colleagues at the airlines and with some good help from some outside consultants as well.
    Ms. JOHNSON. On a more personal note, I would much rather be on the ground during the turbulence. I have happened to have experienced both, and my preference is to be on the ground.
    But we have had tremendous delays out of DFW, as you know. Is there any study going on as to whether it is really due to turbulence and weather?
    Ms. GARVEY. Certainly the issue of cause of delays is something we are constantly looking at. I think that gets also to Congressman Bass's comment, whether there are trends developing. So we are looking at them, both in regions like Dallas-Fort Worth but then also looking at it nationally as well. We have had some unusual weather patterns this last year. We were looking at some of the statistics that came out of the weather agencies, and we are seeing this past year some severe weather patterns that we have not seen previously, although, again, as I will underscore, our challenge is to manage around that and to manage it in a way that is safe and efficient.
    Ms. JOHNSON. Do you think that—the environmental changes, of course, would have some impacts, but do you see any progress being made in that direction that might take place rapidly enough to impact the weather patterns as you plan the redesign?
 Page 49       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Certainly we are engaged in research with NASA and others to look at what some of the environmental issues are. I would like to get back to you with a little more detail, I think, to answer your question more fully. I am not as versed in that particular area as perhaps I should be.
    Ms. JOHNSON. Finally, there are airports that want to do expansion to improve runways and perhaps even add international runways, which can be covered by the AIR-21 proposal. But I don't think AIR-21 proposal has your support. Is there a reason?
    Ms. GARVEY. I will mention, as I have in the past, that I think— and I think the Secretary has mentioned as well— there are a number of elements in AIR-21 that we are very excited about; and we think, as a matter of fact, it is very similar to the Administration's proposal of last year. I think the issue that continues to be a cause of concern to the Administration is the off-budget proposal.
    Again, we would look forward to working with you and trying to resolve some of those issues. We know those are great challenges, not just for this Committee but for Congress as a whole, and we look forward to being part of the dialogue. But I am encouraged by a number of the elements that are a part of AIR-21.
    Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you.
    Mr. Sherwood.
    Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you, Ms. Garvey. It has been interesting to hear your testimony. Like Mr. LaHood, I am always very much impressed with how well the system works, and I have great faith in your ability to work through this little blip in delays.
    What I would like to ask you about is the interaction between the redesign of the system and the availability of the new technology. I am concerned not as much with the delays that we have had this summer but with our equipment becoming outdated, and I would like to hear a little more from you. I realize you have touched on that, but I think what is going to be important in the long run is how well we can get the new technology, how soon we can get new technology in the hands of our controllers. I would like to hear your thoughts on that.
 Page 50       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. That is a really excellent question because it is something that we have really focused on. You are absolutely right, as we are redesigning the question of where does the technology fit and how does that fit into the solution is important to us.
    This is one of the issues being managed by a small group of the managers reporting directly to me. We are paying a lot of attention to it and have our key players on it, including Charlie Keegan, who is also in charge of Free Flight Phase I. As we are working through the redesign issues, he is very much part of those discussions. As he is thinking about where to put and deploy the technology, we are making sure that is coordinated with the redesign. They are not operating in isolation but very much coordinated.
    Also, as we are thinking through the redesign, we are very much aware of where we are putting things such as STARS, where are the new technologies going to, we are making sure it is not going to cause more problems. Some of the redesigns are going to mean some significant changes, and we want to make sure that is very much coordinated with the technology schedules we have. We are aware of that, we are focusing on that, and I think we have the right people at the table to make sure that we are all aware of all of the elements.
    Mr. SHERWOOD. Do you feel that you have the long-term resources to accomplish it?
    Ms. GARVEY. I will tell you, resources, Congressman, are always an issue for us and a concern for us, and we have appreciated the support of this Committee. We are a little concerned, quite honestly, about our budget for 2000. We are, you know, analyzing that now, and we certainly hope that the programs—that we are very committed that we will be able to stay on track. But we are doing that analysis right now.
    Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
 Page 51       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Mr. Chairman, let me again applaud you for convening such a hearing on such an important issue.
    Ms. Garvey, you gave a very eloquent report this morning and very thorough, in my estimation.
    I would, first, like to tell you that last week I was talking about you and the Y2K, and I do recall your saying you were going to be flying on December 31st to ensure that Y2K was intact. I just heard you say that you would be at the controls, or the question was raised, will she be at the controls? I am not sure you will be flying the plane. You will just be in the plane, correct?
    Ms. GARVEY. Fortunately for everyone involved, I will not be. I will be sitting in coach.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. I might be with you to ensure that everything goes well.
    On November 9th, if everything goes well in this House and we are out, Los Angeles and Southern California will be convening a transportation summit to look at a lot of the concerns you have raised here today as well as ground transportation and intermodal transportation as well. We hope you will come, because we do need to get a feel for what you are looking at and your predictions nationally as it relates to air traffic and especially in the Los Angeles and Southern California area.
    My first question though to you is, in July, ATA and its members requested that you perform an evaluation of its major centers and facilities to determine what causes the delays—what causes or increases the delays. In your statement today, would this be the results of that evaluation?
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct. I think in the written statement it talks about 167 action items that we have identified and that we are tracking together. You are absolutely right, that came about as a result of that evaluation we did with ATA.
 Page 52       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Fine. I just wanted to make sure I was not privy to some more information that perhaps was not in your report. But the report did indicate that.
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. You also stated in your testimony that airport capacity limitations contribute to delay. Can you expound upon that, including the relationship, if any, to airline scheduling practices?
    Ms. GARVEY. As so many of the Members here today have stated quite directly, this really is a multifaceted process and I think of it as three pieces.
    There is certainly the FAA part and the air traffic control piece. There is the piece that is controlled by the airlines, which has to do with some of their own procedures and scheduling. Of course, there is the part that is under the jurisdiction of the airports, which really involves some of the runway issues that you talked about. Certainly you know those issues well from your district and the challenges that the airports often face in trying to provide for that land side capacity as we are modernizing the air traffic control. Someone said the other day, you know, we can do everything that is humanly possible for air traffic control, but we still have those runway issues and capacity issues on the land side.
    Having said that, I know how difficult they are locally; they are very difficult and sometimes, as we mentioned, very emotional. But trying to find that right balance so that we can provide for that land side runway capacity is going to be one of the great challenges, both for the airports and for the FAA as well.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. So those are challenges that we must continue to work to some conclusions on.
    Ms. GARVEY. That is correct.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. I am happy to say I guess to some degree, looking at the large percentages of delays in some of the major airports, at Los Angeles, it was not one of those, but San Francisco did have tremendous delays. Would you say that, in addition to the low ceiling and visibility we—I certainly can attest to in flying in and out of San Francisco, with the inoperable runways, would they be a factor as well in San Francisco?
 Page 53       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. I know John Martin, the director for San Francisco, has mentioned that quite frequently; and I know he is very focused on it. But I think your initial comment was right on target, which is the weather plays a very key role in San Francisco, and the clearer weather in Los Angeles is a big help.
    Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. I would like to say as I have flown, and we all fly quite frequently, that the weather seems to have gotten worse around the Nation, and indeed I appreciate any delays that happen to keep us from being in the air bumping around as much as we do sometimes.
    Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Dr. Cooksey.
    Mr. COOKSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I want to ask you some numbers questions about your budget and so forth.
    If today the American public decided that the number one priority of this Nation was to have a state-of-the-art air traffic controller system with all the latest technology and equipment, how much would it cost and how soon could you have it in place?
    Ms. GARVEY. I would like to get back to you on a total number.
    Mr. COOKSEY. Just a ball park figure.
    Ms. GARVEY. They are reminding me it is never fully done, that it is always an evolving system. It would certainly be billions though.
    Mr. COOKSEY. One billion or 5 billion or 20 billion? Just a number. I realize this is not—I have got a follow-up question. Best case scenario.
    Ms. GARVEY. I am getting a lot of help from the folks I brought with me. That is why I brought you guys.
 Page 54       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. COOKSEY. After Sputnik, we put that as a top priority, and we went to the moon.
    Ms. GARVEY. Steve is mentioning that the number that has been put out previously, when you look at all of the architecture within modernization, comes very close to 50. But just to add to that, I think that is why, from our perspective, the incremental approach is so important, that we have tried to break it into those chunks where we can work at it step by step and building block by building block.
    Mr. COOKSEY. Let's say $50 billion. Could you spend that $50 billion until 5 years or would it take you 10 years to put this in place?
    Ms. GARVEY. It would take many, many years. As Steve says, it is always evolving.
    What we have done with Free Flight Phase I is identify 2002 to 2005 as the timetable that we have put in place. Actually his point, and I shouldn't make light of it, his point is really well taken. We are always going to be modernizing. There is always going to be new technology that we are going to be adding to the system. I think that is really important.
    I will tell you, from my perspective, if we have enough money to do Free Flight Phase I, to keep STARS on track, to keep WAAS on track, I think I would feel extraordinarily pleased. I think those are really the critical pieces. That is, frankly, what we are looking at right now. What does the 2000 budget mean for us in terms of some of these very critical budgets? I think Free Flight Phase I is in pretty good shape. I am concerned about some of the others, and we will have more information over the next 2 or 3 days on that.
    Mr. COOKSEY. A follow-up to that: How much of your budget comes from Aviation Trust Fund? What percentage? A third, a fourth, a half?
    Ms. GARVEY. I am going to have to ask my staff.
    Mr. COOKSEY. These are really budget questions I am asking you.
 Page 55       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Mary has reminded me that in the 2000 budget, all of it is coming out of the Aviation Trust Fund.
    Mr. COOKSEY. None of it is coming from general revenues. In the past—.
    Ms. GARVEY. In the past it has, absolutely—25 percent.
    Mr. COOKSEY. And in your statement you indicated that you intended to get— have an ATC revenue stream that would be cost-based. Are you deriving some revenues from that?
    Ms. GARVEY. Obviously from the excise tax, what we have talked about in the Administration's budget. But I will also go back to the Administration's proposal from last year, and I know Congressman Oberstar said this was a very controversial element of the Administration's bill, but that was linking revenues in to expenditures. So we were calling for a pricing system which was more cost-based, if you will. The cost-based idea is something that Congressman Mineta talked about. We think the cost accounting system is very important, but, long term, the Administration has talked about the pricing system.
    Mr. COOKSEY. Well, there is no question that everyone should use a cost-based system for all accounting. There a lot of questionable accounting done in this city, I have found. How much money is in the Aviation Trust Fund, do you know? I should know, but I don't.
    Ms. GARVEY. It is about $8 billion, I think it is about $8 billion. I would like to get back to you if I could.
    Mr. COOKSEY. Well, I hope that the taxpayers and the politicians see fit to give you the resources you need to do everything as quick as you can to achieve this goal of free flight, direct flight, aviation safety. I think you will utilize it well if we can get it to you.
 Page 56       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Thanks you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Lampson.
    Mr. LAMPSON. The first thing I want to do is commend Ms. Garvey and your staff. We have worked on some problems, local problems with regional airports and some other things that have occurred within my district. Your staff is excellent in responding and most cordial.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you very much.
    Mr. LAMPSON. I mentioned earlier my concern about the use of regional airports and what might be happening with them overtime. Some obviously are different situations than the one I am most knowledgeable with, because that one regional airport in my district is 70 miles from one major airport and less than 80 miles from another. Heavy demand in all of those places.
    Has the FAA done any work on how changes in fleet mix or regional jets and aircraft technology will impact the future demand for air traffic services? Have you planned to manage these changes and what generally can you tell me about what you view as the problems and solutions for regional airports?
    Ms. GARVEY. Let me see if I can answer your question two ways.
    First, in terms of the regional airports, let me say we absolutely agree with you, that when you look at the enormous growth in aviation, thinking in terms of an aviation system as opposed to one singular, important airport, we think is becoming increasingly important. I thought one of the good elements of the Administration's bill last year was to call for some additional monies being targeted to some of those smaller and regional airports. We do recognize, as I know this Committee does, the importance of those smaller and regional airports.
    The second point in your question about the mix and are we preparing for the change in fleet mix and so forth, that is absolutely something that is front and center for us as we are thinking particularly about the National Airspace redesign, because we do have to accommodate that change in fleet mix.
 Page 57       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I will add, though, it is very complicated, and I am not sure we have yet, the full answer to that, and that is why involving both the industry—Walt Coleman from the Regional Airline Association has been extraordinarily helpful, as have the airlines themselves through ATA. As Members of this Committee have suggested, too, involving others in trying to solve some of those problems is going to be very important.
    We don't have a short answer, we don't have the full complete solution in place yet, but we are very much aware of it and very much taking that into account as we are thinking through the redesign.
    Mr. LAMPSON. Some have said that perhaps the best thing we could do is move more people on the ground between certain areas to major hubs. Do you have any feelings or thoughts about that?
    Ms. GARVEY. You know, I think when you look at transportation you do have to look at it as a whole system and in total. I know there has been a lot of discussion, for example, in the Northeast about the Amtrak connection, and some of the greatest proponents of Amtrak are people who are managing some of those airports, because they know it can be very congested. When we look at transportation more and more, we are looking at it in total. I think that is important. And certainly I am always enthusiastic when I see some of our surface colleagues moving ahead on some solutions that really help a whole region.
    Mr. LAMPSON. Well, there will continue to be problems we are facing, and we look forward to continuing to work with you.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you for your kind comments about the staff.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Moran.
    Mr. MORAN. Mr. Chairman, thank you; and, Ms. Garvey, thank you for joining us.
    Ms. GARVEY. Nice to see you.
 Page 58       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. MORAN. Generally where I come from we like to have more air service, and my question—and that is particularly true in Wichita, Kansas. It is true even in Kansas City. And my question is, are there policies in place that encourage or discourage the utilization of the regional airports that deal with this issue of congestion? Or is that simply a private sector issue as to where the flights will originate? Do you understand my question?
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, I think one of the policies that we have certainly looked at as we were developing the reauthorization proposal from last year was to really think in terms of could we target more Federal dollars for some of the smaller and regional airports, and I think we were able to do that in our legislation. I think this Committee was also able to do that.
    Targeting some of the Federal dollars has been important.
    I have asked and I am not sure I have a full answer for you today, but I think as we look at some of our own policies for passenger facility charges, for example, are we making it easy for regional and smaller airports to access some of that, I think those are questions we can look at.
    Mr. MORAN. In addition to the infrastructure issues and the dollars that you may direct toward other airports, other more regional airports, is there a role in the solution to the congestion problem by encouraging flights to originate and depart from other airports than those in which the congestion is the most severe?
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, that is a fair question, and I think that is one, as we work through with the airlines, a lot of that is market driven, but those are questions we need to continue to ask ourselves. DOT—and I know it has been controversial—put forward a competition policy they are still working through. Again, I think those are important issues and we probably need to engage a little bit more with the airlines on some of those questions.
 Page 59       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. MORAN. Would you say, Administrator, that at the moment those decisions are strictly made in the private sector?
    Ms. GARVEY. I think they are definitely much more made in the private sector. But, again, I think we can help with that by targeting some of those Federal dollars to make sure that the infrastructure is in place, if the market allows that demand to be there.
    Mr. MORAN. Thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Ms. Brown.
    Ms. BROWN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a question.
    Recently, Ms. Garvey, I had a visit from several air traffic controllers, and they felt that since the training takes a long time and that FAA may not be taking into effect the large number of retirees that will occur in the next few years, and there could have been some problems with the recent study that was done—can you expound upon that just a little bit for us?
    Ms. GARVEY. I hope I am answering this correctly. I think the issue is that we may be reaching a point very soon where we will have a large exodus of some of our employees. But, by the way, that is not just with air traffic control, but I think that is also true with the technicians and even some of the technical experts we have.
    One of the challenges for us—and I can tell you, Glenda Tate is the head of our human resources and is working with this issue with our employee organization—that is to think in terms of what are the kinds of succession plans we want to put in place. We are looking at that. We know that is an issue we have to be concerned with. I think the issue of training is one that we have heard about, both from technicians and from the controllers. I think those are issues we have got to keep working on.
 Page 60       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Again, I get a little concerned with our budget. It is always easy to cut back on training, and we want to be very careful we don't do that, particularly as we get some of the new technology in place. We have to have people prepared to use that correctly. They have offered some good suggestions, and we are happy to take those suggestions from both the technicians and the controllers.
    Ms. BROWN. Was there any problems with the studies that were done in this area?
    Ms. GARVEY. I am not aware of any problems. But I will double-check and get back to you if I learn more.
    Ms. BROWN. Thank you. I yield back the balance of my time.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Thune.
    Mr. THUNE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Ms. Garvey, thank you for being with us today.
    Ms. GARVEY. Good morning, Congressman.
    Mr. THUNE. Volume is not normally a problem we have in South Dakota. We don't have a lot of air traffic control problems. We would like to change that, obviously. We would like to have more flights into a lot of our communities. We do as we connect with the various hubs run into this problem frequently and a lot of delays, the statistics that have already been alluded to.
    Just a question on—a lot of times, I can draw from personal experience as well as my constituents who raise some of these issues with me. The question of when an airline, for example, blames a problem on the air traffic control system—recently I ended up in Chicago overnight. There was a delay, missed the connecting flight into South Dakota, and they give you the number of the Super 8, and for $100 and a pat on the back you can stay overnight and catch the next flight the next morning.
 Page 61       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    But the air traffic control system is, basically, the target of the problem. I am wondering if you have any way, the FAA, some sort of a system of verifying when in fact it is an air traffic control system problem versus an airline? I am not at all drawing into question here the veracity of the airlines, but I think a lot of people have questions as to whether or not in fact that is an air traffic control system or whether it is an airline issue.
    Ms. GARVEY. That is a good question, and the issue about how we define a delay and what makes up an air traffic control delay, what makes up an airline delay is something we are talking with the airlines about now. I think we sometimes define things very differently, and so getting a common definition is important. We are struggling a little bit with it, because I think we come at it slightly differently.
    You know, it has been interesting, and I think the Chairman mentioned this a little bit earlier, but sometimes some of these discussions have gotten down to well, it is this guy's fault or that guy's fault. And, frankly, from my perspective, I want to focus on what we can focus on. I think what has been extraordinarily helpful about this discussion today is I think it has highlighted very clearly that it is a multifaceted issue and one we have to attack together.
    But your point about where does the problem lie sometimes is something in terms of defining what is the air traffic control delay, is something we really have to work through with the airlines and get a much better definition. We are not there yet.
    Mr. THUNE. I think that would be a good idea. It seems to me that that ensures some level of accountability.
    It is always easy when there are several players in the mix to blame somebody else for not getting the job done, and for purposes of determining who in fact is responsible for these times of delays, I think it is very useful, obviously from your standpoint. But certainly as well from the traveling public's standpoint, I think they just need to know. It is very frustrating when people—when there are delays and people are hung up and get stuck overnight and have to foot the bill out of their own pocket. They want to at least have some assurance about who is responsible for that. And hopefully help us better define the problem so we can better define the issue.
 Page 62       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. That is absolutely right.
    Mr. THUNE. One other question I have which is becoming more of an issue evidently from what I am reading here, we are seeing more and more regional jet service starting to crop up in the areas traditionally underserved. Because of the altitudes and speeds at which they fly, that is creating some problems with the air traffic control system. My hope would be in South Dakota we will see more regional jets and fewer twin prop puddle-jumpers, from the leg space standpoint.
    But my question would be, as we see more of these jets come into service, come on line, however you want to refer to that, what is that going to do and is it going to be—is that number going to increase substantially? That is probably a better question to ask the airlines when they get up here, but what is your view on that?
    Ms. GARVEY. Congressman, you are absolutely right. In fact, we have already seen greater numbers than we had anticipated. And you are absolutely right, too, in saying it is both wonderful for access and wonderful for competition, and people love them. But it is creating some real challenges for us, and we don't fully yet know how to accommodate all of those increased numbers. Those are issues we are still really working through.
    We are delighted to have the added expertise of people like Walt Coleman and the airlines to help sort through some of those issues with us. But it has a real effect on how we are redesigning the airspace, has a real effect on how we are managing traffic. It is something that probably 10 years ago, if you asked people, we just would not have anticipated it.
    So we are asking the right questions. We still have to find some of those solutions, though.
    Mr. THUNE. It is one of those deals, it is a nice problem to have.
    Ms. GARVEY. It is a nice problem to have, right.
 Page 63       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. THUNE. It seems it is going to create some interesting challenges down the road.
    Ms. GARVEY. Again, just to underscore what others have said, the work that the air traffic controllers are doing in this area to manage that in spite of all this is really extraordinary.
    Mr. THUNE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Thune.
    Mr. Lipinski.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Hello, once again.
    Ms. GARVEY. Congressman.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. It seems like it has been days.
    Ms. GARVEY. I am having a great time.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. I am sure you are having a wonderful time. Whether you are having a good time or not, you are doing a superb job.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thanks, Congressman.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. You mentioned about $50 billion for modernization. I would like to know how much do you need a year for modernization? I am trying to get it down to a little bit more reasonable figure. Then I think it would be very helpful to us, particularly since we are going into conference with the Senate, in regards to our AIR-21 bill. So I thought maybe you could tell us each year how much you think you are going to need.
    Ms. GARVEY. If I could supply that for the record.
    I will tell you what I would like to do is I would like to focus on something like Free Flight Phase I, STARS, the continuation of DSR. And I would like to, if I could, run through with staff some of those numbers and provide that for the record. Because I do think you are right, that is a huge number. We have got to get it to be more manageable and sort of lay it out in increments.
 Page 64       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. LIPINSKI. We would certainly appreciate it if you would do that as quickly as possible, get us that information. I think it would be helpful to us when we go into conference on the AIR-21 bill with the Senate.
    I also want to point out that it came up earlier that all the money for 2000 is coming out of the Aviation Trust Fund. Normally, 25 percent comes out of the General Revenue Fund. But, unfortunately, over the very strong and vigorous objections of this committee, the appropriators this year decided not to give us any money out of the General Revenue Fund, and it was I think very disappointing and very shortsighted on their part to our traveling public.
    I applaud you for getting together with the carriers to come up with your 21 short-term solutions to our delay problems, but it has been brought to my attention that there were no—and I would like to find out if it is true or not, that there were no pilots or no air traffic controllers involved in these meetings. And if they weren't, why didn't you reach out to those groups since they are both very much involved in the system also?
    Ms. GARVEY. The air traffic controllers actually were involved. Mike McNally was part of the August meeting. That is a fair observation in terms of the pilots, and I will speak with the Pilots Association about the most effective way.
    By the way, they have been involved in a number of individual initiatives that we have had and have been extraordinarily helpful at sorting through some difficult issues. But I think that a fair observation, and we should figure out a way to involve them. They have great expertise.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. A favorite question that people like to ask, and I will ask it since no one else has asked it so far during the course of this hearing, how is everything with the air traffic control system as far as the Y2K problems that we are having? I know you have testified in the past that things are going to be very good, but I am sure everyone would like to have that reinforced once again the closer we get to that date.
 Page 65       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. Right. We met the deadline of June 30th of having all of our systems Y2K compliant. That is a great testimony to the technicians in particular who worked on this literally around the clock. I was very excited that we were able to meet that deadline.
    The challenge for us now between June 30th and obviously 2000 is to make sure that we maintain the integrity of the fixes we have put in place. As we are making any changes and so forth, we want to make sure the Y2K integrity is protected. We have a moratorium on putting in new equipment, for example, during the critical couple of weeks leading up to the year 2000, and we will have it again around the leap year, which is another transition piece.
    But we are making tremendous progress. We are focused very much on the whole international issue and where our international colleagues are now, putting information up on a web site we have, with State and DOT, to let people know the status as we are learning about it internationally.
    But domestically I feel very good about it. The airlines are right on target as well, and you may hear more from Carol Hallet about that. But they have been out talking very publicly about the great progress they have made as well.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. Going back to your short-term solutions, you mentioned a number of them that you implemented. You mentioned a number that was implemented. What are the ones that you have on the books that you haven't implemented as of yet? I don't recall hearing what those are.
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, some of them have to do with the airlines. For example, we have invited the airlines to come into the Command Center, and that is ongoing. We are doing that. There are a couple of procedural changes that we want to make that are ongoing. But, again, great progress has been made.
    We continue though, by the way, to bring the airline operators in—the last meeting was last week at ATA—to again do a little reality check. How are we doing? Is it going well? Are there other issues we need to think about? And this also gives us an opportunity to say, 'Hey, wait a minute, folks, we can't have 20 calls into the Command Center, you know, when we have a problem.' We have to sort of sort that out a little bit. It givers both of us a chance to communicate pretty directly.
 Page 66       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I was not able to attend the last two, but I am looking forward, as I know they must be, to my attending the next one.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. I am sure that they are.
    Well, the delays this summer were terrible. There is no question about it. I had an experience—for over 30 years I have been running a parade on a Thursday night before the 4th of July. We were in session, but I wasn't going to miss my parade. It would have been the first time that I had ever missed it.
    So I left here about 3 o'clock on the world's greatest airline, the one I fly all the time. And I know American is sitting over there, and they are wonderful, too, but I happen to fly United.
    Ms. GARVEY. They are all wonderful.
    Mr. LIPINSKI. They are all wonderful, you are right. Southwest is wonderful, I don't want to say anything against Southwest; I want them to keep flying out of Midway.
    But I left here about 3 o'clock and got on the plane, I think it was—it must have been a 3 o'clock flight, to make sure that I got there on time, and we pushed back at 10 minutes after 3:00. And I arrived at O'Hare International Airport that night at 10:35. We sat out there on that runway all the time. It was a nice, quick flight. They had those babies wide open coming in, but it took us an awful lot of time to get out of here.
    I missed 12 votes. I missed my parade, so it was a horrendous experience. And I am sure that many other individuals in this Nation had those problems during the course of this summer.
    But just to put the whole situation into the proper perspective, I would like to put into the record—there is a chart here that I have, and it talks about operational delays, comparison, European and American airports. It is the first quarter calendar year 1999, percentage of flight delays.
 Page 67       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Now, here are the five worst airports in this country in the percentage of delays: Atlanta, 3.2; Chicago, 4.1; LaGuardia, 4.9; Newark, 5.7; San Francisco, 5.8. Now, here are the best four in Europe, 39.9—excuse me, 13.9, that is in Dublin; Athens, 19.2; Vienna, 19.9; Dusseldorf, 20.1. Now that is their four best airports, okay? Their worst airports, Rome, 33.3; Oslo, 33.6; Munich, 35.7; Geneva, 38.6, and don't ever fly into Milan and think you are going to get there on time, 56.3.
    Now, I think that this chart really puts it into the proper perspective. This summer was terrible; we all had very bad experiences. But if we were flying in any other country in the world, I guarantee you it would have been much, much worse.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Lipinski.
    Mr. Sweeney.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the time.
    And welcome—.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you, Mr. Congressman.
    Mr. SWEENEY. —Ms. Garvey. I, like my colleagues, at least the ones I heard so far today, want to compliment you on the job that you are doing and let you know that your staff is the most responsive of staffs.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you very much.
    Mr. SWEENEY. I am not often prone to being so complimentary to those in the Federal system, but working with you is very, very rewarding.
    Let me also ask almost a simplistic kind of basic question, and it is one that puzzles me, and when I go out in my district—like Mr. Moran's, it is an underserved district in upstate New York—I am asked this question often and I am not quite sure how to answer it, and that is, with the increases that we have in the use of our aviation system—and as you have mentioned, it is all part of an infrastructure and a system approach to transportation—is it realistic to expect that we can service and manage this system with four hub spokes as the center core to our system; and has the FAA thought of that process and looked at it in an expansion, and how would that go about?
 Page 68       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I understand the airlines would have a predominant decision or a voice in that process. But is it really realistic to expect we are not going to have delays, that we are not going to have underserviced areas when everything—and in my area everything is really predicated on whether we can get in and out of JFK, LaGuardia. JFK and LaGuardia, it seems to me, are at a saturation point.
    Is it realistic to run a system that way?
    Ms. GARVEY. Well, I think your point about, if it is realistic to ever eliminate delays is right; I don't think we will ever eliminate them. Our challenge is really to minimize them as much as we can. The part that we obviously are so focused on is the whole issue of safety and how can we move, whatever the system is, whether it is a hub-and-spoke system, or whatever it is, that we can move aircraft safely and efficiently through the system.
    We have continued to put—and it has become increasingly important—more emphasis on some of the smaller regional airports, because we do believe, as I indicated a little bit earlier, we do believe that you have to look at a whole aviation system. It is not a question any more, because of the kind of growth that we seem to rely solely on, one major airport, but we have to really look at the whole system.
    The area that I am most familiar with —Logan, for example, in Boston; Providence and Manchester and Bradley and other airports in that area—are becoming increasingly important; and I have to say Worcester since Congressman McGovern was here earlier. But those airports are becoming increasingly important.
    Your point about this, that we really do need to think of it as a system, is absolutely right.
    Mr. SWEENEY. And regional jets, I think, will probably be the infusion and expansion of regional jets will have a real impact on that.
 Page 69       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. GARVEY. I think you are right.
    Mr. SWEENEY. I would be interested in continuing to talk with your folks about that effect, and specifically how it affects my district obviously, but that effect nationwide.
    I will just conclude with, Mr. Thune made a point that I think is very relevant as one who has had a number of complaints both personally and from constituents as it relates to air travel and delays and cancellations, that it would be very helpful for us to be able to understand or begin to look at a breakdown of where those occurrences were happening, where it was most prevalent, especially as it related to the various airlines.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you.
    Mr. SWEENEY. If you could do that, I think it would help answer a lot of questions.
    Ms. GARVEY. We are working hard on it. It is a tough issue, but we are working hard on it.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Oberstar.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I shall be very brief.
    It is important to keep in mind that in the last year and a half there has not been a major air carrier accident in the domestic United States. And secondly, for all of the hue and cry about weather as an impediment to travel, but the overcaution exercised by the air traffic control system, about miles-in-trail, about those nettlesome regional jets and turboprops, the first time we put down an aircraft because of the air traffic system itself there will be a crescendo of howls and calls, accusations and calls for heads to roll, prefer that the system err on the side of caution and care than to rush headlong into quick fixes that only create more problems.
 Page 70       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Second, I would like you not to give a detailed answer, but you can't at this time, to make a commitment, an effort to harmonize the weather radar equipment within FAA and between FAA and the air carrier system and to improve coordination and dissemination of important weather information on a real-time basis. And, second, to accelerate as a high priority the redesign of the air space as part of—the first part of the free flight program.
    Can you make that commitment?
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you. Yes, I will, Congressman, and I thank you very much. I was interested in those comments about weather and harmonization during your opening statement. And I know some of that we are doing, and some other areas, I think we have to redouble our efforts. But thank you.
    Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Administrator Garvey, we do need to get on to our witnesses, and I realize that, but there is one area I want to get into, in part because of my curiosity, and also I want to get your comments on this. But I sometimes, depending on the mood I am in, find it a little humorous—I sometimes get irritated—when I read all of these stories about how old the equipment is, the ATC equipment and so forth, and how outdated it is. Because I go to all of these FAA facilities or the control towers all around the country and at various airports and other places, and I see all new equipment, I see all new computers. And the GAO tells us we have spent $27 billion on new equipment. In the last few years, we have spent—whatever it is, it is many, many billions, and yet when you read some of these reports, you would think we haven't done anything over the last few years.
    I do realize that with modern technology, modern computers, almost anything you buy is outdated in a short time; but basically, it seems to me that the FAA has state-of-the-art equipment in most of its facilities. But at our hearing in New Hampshire on Monday, we actually had a couple of controllers on the panel, and they said that they could get more and better information off of the Internet than they could get from the FAA equipment.
 Page 71       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Then there was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently that said that airline pilots could see holes in storm systems that were 100 miles wide that they could easily fly through, however, controllers using FAA equipment could not see these holes, so they would not let the pilots fly through them.
    Then in another recent article Robert Crandall, the former head of American Airlines, was quoted as saying that ''the actual level of ATC automation is little different today than it was 15 years ago.''.
    Why is it that we keep seeing all of these negative stories about all of this old equipment when we spent all of these billions and billions? And I know we have had some cost overruns and we have had some delays. But the GAO told us on Monday at our field hearing that the DSR equipment was coming in under budget and was ahead of schedule. We were in a facility that—we were there on Monday, they were getting ready to move into totally new facilities with totally new equipment on Friday, tomorrow.
    Is it just that the media simply wants to report just the bad and not the good? Can you—is that part of it and can you reassure the flying public that they are not flying with old, antiquated, out-of-date equipment that is going to cause some crashes in the near future?
    I mean, what is the actual story? As I said at the hearing on Monday, is there a good side to all of this that we are not getting?
    Ms. GARVEY. Let me try to answer that in a couple of ways.
    First of all, I think we absolutely share your frustration. I am always so grateful when I come before this committee and you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Oberstar mention the equipment. And it is thousands of pieces of equipment.
    We talk about sustaining the system. We are putting out new radars as Steve Brown, who is sitting behind me, likes to say we are getting younger every day. In that sense, we are doing a great deal, and whether it is a combination of the media not playing that up or us not doing a good enough job communicating that, I am not sure. But we are absolutely putting out thousands of pieces of equipment every year and that is replenishing, revitalizing, sustaining the system. That is very important.
 Page 72       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I did read some of the testimony from the controllers in New Hampshire, and in a sense, they are right, there are some concerns that we have. That gets to Congressman Oberstar's comments as well. There are improvements in the weather. There are some functionalities we need to continue to add and we are prioritizing those with the air traffic controllers so that we can continue to add those technologies, and I think that is very important as well.
    The third and final piece, the incremental approach, is exactly the right approach. Again, it doesn't mean we are not going to have some hiccups along the way, but it is the right approach. We have got consensus on some very important elements, and we are moving ahead with it.
    I am delighted with DSR. We are ahead of schedule and slightly under budget. We are ahead of schedule on HOST, and there are a lot of folks who said we couldn't do that.
    We have turned the corner on STARS and we are going to meet that deadline of December and January for El Paso and Syracuse, and we are going to do that in large part because we have got the controllers and technicians at the table with us figuring out the solutions and getting it done. We are on the right track.
    We know how to do it. We are getting it done. We have still got some challenges, but I am very pleased with the progress that we are making.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, I will say that Dr. Dillingham on Monday at the hearing was very complimentary of this incremental approach, and it did sound like things are getting better. But I wish that more people would hear about that. And I wish that the next time or every time that you read one of these stories about how old and antiquated and outdated the FAA equipment, the ATC equipment is, you would have somebody call up that reporter and challenge them to go with them to see all of this new equipment that you have got all over the country and how good a lot of this is, so that they—so that the flying public knows that there is another side to this story.
 Page 73       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    But we do need to move on. Thank you very much for being with us.
    Ms. GARVEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. You have done a great job, as usual.
    And we will now move to the second panel.
    And on this second panel, our main panel for today, are Ms. Carol B. Hallett, who is President of the Air Transportation Association; Captain Duane E. Woerth, who is President of the Air Line Pilots Association, International; Mr. Randy Schwitz, who is Executive Vice President of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association; and Mr. Russell Chew, who is Managing Director, Systems Operations Control, for American Airlines.

TESTIMONY OF CAROL B. HALLETT, PRESIDENT AND CEO, AIR TRANSPORT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA; CAPTAIN DUANE E. WOERTH, PRESIDENT, AIR LINE PILOTS ASSOCIATION, INTERNATIONAL; RANDY SCHWITZ, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, NATIONAL AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS ASSOCIATION; AND CAPTAIN RUSSELL CHEW, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SYSTEMS OPERATIONS CONTROL, AMERICAN AIRLINES, INC.

    Mr. DUNCAN. And we will proceed as usual in the order the witnesses are listed on the call of the hearing. And that means that, Ms. Hallett, we will start with you and you may begin your statement. Thank you very much for being with us today, and thank you for being patient and waiting through a large number of statements and comments and questions until now. Thank you very much.

    Ms. HALLETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Lipinski and members of the subcommittee. I am Carol Hallett, President and CEO of the Air Transport Association. And I greatly appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to present the views of ATA on the mounting and frustrating delays in the air traffic control system.
 Page 74       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The air traffic control delays that were experienced this summer were in fact the worst in history, and we share the frustrations that you and your constituents have faced with these delays. The time has come for us to take bold steps. I believe that includes implementation of a near-term work plan; certainly it includes making AIR-21 a reality, as well as, I believe, it is time for an air traffic control summit to focus on the broader long-term issues.
    Through August of this year, delays were up almost 20 percent, as a result the airlines and our passengers lost billions of dollars and millions of hours of productivity. In July alone, over 100,000 passengers were delayed daily by the Federal Government's air traffic control system.
    Let us look for a moment just at July 31st, which was a classic example of a system not working. On that day, 700 flights were delayed and at O'Hare alone, over 9,000 passengers' flights were canceled due to inadequate weather management.
    The seeming inability of the Federal Government to operate the air traffic control system efficiently imposes significant burdens on both our passengers and the airline industry. Even though traffic increases have been accurately forecast on an annual basis by the FAA, the government's air traffic control system has failed to keep up with its own predictions.
    Without proper planning and implementation of strategies to meet those increases, the NCARC's prediction of gridlock by 2004 arrived 5 years early, because this summer's experience is—I believe it is safe to say, shows us that gridlock is already here.
    Now, on the chart that you have over here to your right, you will see the—well, I guess I would call it orange, some might call this red. That comprises in the orange/red area roughly 70 percent of total delays are attributable to weather. Now, this is all information from the FAA; this is not our information.
    The industry's experience is that when severe weather occurs, the system is disrupted far more than it needs to be. This is taking into effect safety which is our number one priority. The FAA, we believe, can do a better job dealing with weather without compromising safety, and no one should every compromise safety.
 Page 75       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    As Administrator Garvey mentioned this morning—and I compliment her on the outstanding job that she did today, but what she is doing every day. She mentioned in her testimony that ATA has been working closely with the FAA to identify all of these problems and that is indeed the case. We are working together, as we should, and it has been a very effective process.
    This joint FAA/ATA evaluation that was conducted that has been discussed this morning is something that we believe is the right way to approach these problems. Those are problems that will not change quickly, but we are working in the right direction, and certainly from the severe weather programs, to the excessive ground holds, the significant increases in miles-in-trail, as well as the communication shortcomings mentioned not only by Administrator Garvey, but many of you; those are issues that we are all working on. And, fortunately, Administrator Garvey and Monte Belger have set in action the program that she discussed.
    We are committed to working with them in this process and we certainly hope it will bring about near-term meaningful solutions.
    But now I would like to comment briefly on NATCA's allegations and that of others, as well, that the airlines scheduling, not the FAA's handling of the air traffic control system, is the source for the double-digit increases in delays. That is simply not true. FAA's own data shows that delays caused by volume amounted to approximately 7.5 percent of all delays.
    This is a critically important point, because this summer, just between April and August, that means that 97 flights per day out of the 22,000 departures that take place every day were attributable to volume. If we were to stipulate that volume is all scheduling, we are simply talking about 97 flights a day.
    Again, the chart. Now this is going to be a little bit more difficult to see, the red doesn't—the red light doesn't work in the green. But the green area over here is particularly important, because that shows the percentage of delays caused by traffic volume, which is obviously much smaller than what you see in the red. And again this is what was tracked by the FAA—not the airlines, but the FAA.
 Page 76       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Weather obviously is particularly susceptible to sound investment and technologies. And in light of the billions of dollars that the airlines and the customers pay into the Aviation Trust Fund, the FAA needs to do a better job to manage modernization of the ATC system and keep pace with the growth in travel. Enactment of AIR-21 spending and management reforms, taking the Aviation Trust Fund off budget, is absolutely essential.
    And ATA and our member carriers vigorously support what you, Mr. Chairman, and all of the members of the committee have done. And we are particularly encouraged by AIR-21's establishment of a businesslike structure, the establishment of the COO and the board that would report to the administrator is absolutely essential.
    But we also believe it is time to deal with some of the other problems, and in that, I would like to conclude by suggesting that you, Mr. Chairman, call for an air traffic control summit so that we can deal with the long-term needs of the system.
    The FAA's commitment to solving near-term problems and the promise of AIR-21's enactment certainly offer great hope. But I believe it is time for us to deal with the issue in its entirety, and I would urge you to bring every one to the same table so that we will be able to work on these very serious problems that are long-term as well as short-term together.
    We stand ready to work with you and the members. And I believe it is fair to say that it is too important to the millions of people in this country and to our Nation's economy to put this off for even 1 more day. This is absolutely essential.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you very much, Ms. Hallett, for a very fine statement as usual.
    Captain Woerth.

    Captain WOERTH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We did submit a rather lengthy written statement, and I am just going to be brief here, so I request that our entire statement would be included in the record.
 Page 77       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    I, Captain Duane Woerth, I am President of the Air Line Pilots Association, International, which represents 55,000 pilots who fly for 51 airlines in the United States and Canada. And we appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss the very complex issues of air traffic control delays and system safety.
    This subcommittee has demonstrated genuine leadership in its pursuit of legislative solutions to these issues, and we applaud you for your efforts. I certainly don't need to point out that air traffic delays are on the rise.
    There has been a lot of discussion about the causes of these delays and who is to blame. As with any complex problems there are many causes, not all of which are under any one's control such as weather. The primary concern of ALPA is safety. We are committed to raising the bar when it comes to the importance of safety as we seek to modernize the National Air Space System, or the NAS. We have enjoyed the safest air traffic system in the world for many years now, but unfortunately our air traffic system has not kept pace with the demands for increased capacity.
    Now the result is a multitude of innovative capacity enhancement initiatives such as the proposed land-and-hold-short operations revisions and the Houston demonstration program that involves waiving the 250-knot maximum airspeed restriction below 10,000 feet rule. These Band-Aids have not increased system capacity by any measurable extent and have the potential to erode air safety.
    There is no quick and easy fix for air traffic delays. The only true fix is a complete overhaul of our air traffic, air transportation system as we know it. The road map exists, it is the National Airspace System Architecture, currently at Version 4.0.
    Only the aggressive implementation of the programs outlined in the NAS architecture and supporting documents will help alleviate air traffic control delay problems. But let me emphasize this isn't a short-term fix. Modernizing our National Air Space System is a long-term task of huge proportions.
 Page 78       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    It will require many different programs and initiatives. Technology and money are not part of the problem. We have the technology, we are not waiting for anything to be invented, and we have the money. It is called the Aviation Trust Fund. So why aren't we using this fund as it was intended?
    By passing H.R. 1000 earlier this session, the House of Representatives recognized the need to take the trust fund off budget and let it provide stable, adequate funding to modernize our air transportation system.
    Mr. Chairman, you and your colleagues are to be commended for this action, as well as for maintaining the traditional general fund of contributions to the FAA operations. The Senate has now passed its own version of the bill, S. 82. But it does not contain a trust fund provision. It is our sincere hope that when you and the Senate conferees meet to reconcile the differences in the two bills, the House will prevail, and the trust fund will be made independent so it can fulfill its intended purpose.
    As airline pilots, we want to eliminate delays as much as, if not more than, our passengers. Delays contribute to extended duty days, often in excess of 14 hours and therefore increased pilot fatigue and the chance of human error. Much of this past summer's incredible ATC delays were blamed on weather, specifically thunderstorms. A perfectly logical question is, why were thunderstorms a greater ATC problem in 1999 than in previous years?
    The answer, in a nutshell, is that in 1999, increased capacity reached the point of system saturations in many regions of the country. No elasticity or flexibility remained to allow the rerouting of aircraft around thunderstorms into airspace sectors—since these other airspace sectors which were already themselves maxed out capacity demands and self-imposed limitations of the current traffic separation system.
    Bottlenecks formed in the Midwest or the Northeast corridors and backed up traffic all the way to California. Every summer in the future will likely be as bad as 1999, or worse, until we get a new system which can manage this increased demand for capacity safely.
 Page 79       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Some have suggested that the airlines should cut back their schedules. Frankly, that is a practical impossibility if the benefits of deregulation that depend on consumer choice and robust competition and frequency of service are to be preserved. The United States consumer and taxpayer have paid for and deserve a new Air Traffic Control System that can handle increased capacity safely and efficiently into the next century.
    Our Nation also suffers from a lack of available runways, which also contributes to bottleneck delays. Several of the FAA's innovative capacity enhancements have been aimed at getting more airplanes on the currently available concrete at the same time.
    Air traffic control has very specific safety-based restrictions on the runway utilization. We cannot afford to lessen these standards without full and open testing and evaluation.
    It should also be pointed out that the demands placed on the aviation industry by environmental concerns have also severely impacted operations. The airlines and manufacturers have spent millions of dollars designing newer, quieter aircraft; however, pilots are compelled to fly highly complex procedures at less than optimal operational performance standards to comply with ground-based constituent concerns.
    The aviation industry has done all it can to alleviate these complaints. However, the public must understand that reducing system delays may mean more efficient use of terminal airspace and aircraft performance capabilities. And that may result in aircraft flying over somebody's house.
    We have identified lots of problems, but what should we do? To effect meaningful change, it will require a fundamental shift in the way we do business. We already have made significant progress in the area of government and industry consensus under the auspices of RTCA. This chartered Federal advisory committee has forged a government and industry consensus on the core programs needed to implement the NAS architecture.
 Page 80       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    With ALPA's assistance and experience drawn from the Minneapolis Precision Radar Monitor (PRM) project, RTCA developed a process to be followed prior to implementing capacity enhancing procedural changes. This consensus-building process was incorporated into Free Flight guidance documents adopted by the FAA as the standard for all future implementation activities. RTCA is the only organization performing this critical function.
    Another significant element of any program designed to enhance safety and efficiency is an ability to collect accurate data on incidents in the system. We already have such a system for air traffic control, namely, the quality assurance program, otherwise known as ''snitch patch.''.
    However, to properly use this program, it needs to be a no-fault reporting system. If this happens, system capacity would also be increased because the artificial separation buffers currently employed to protect individual controllers from punitive actions would be reduced.
    Other no-fault reporting systems where both pilots and controllers have participated did produce positive results. The American Airlines ASAP program, the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting Systems and the U.S. Airways Altitude Deviation Reporting program are a few examples.
    These programs must have integrity and a credibility with both pilots and controllers to be effective. Only through such a program will we ever be able to identify and correct potentially catastrophic problems. To emphasize our support and publicize the need for NAS modernization, ALPA is initiating a program designed to raise public awareness on this issue.
    The ALPA NAS modernization initiative is an aggressive 6-year program to increase public and governmental awareness on the critical need to modernize our NAS airspace system. It will focus on obtaining increased long-term funding commitments for NAS modernization and maintaining the industry consensus essential to success.
 Page 81       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    In closing, it is important to understand that operational capability enhancements that FAA has tried to date have and will continue to have very little impact because they cannot solve the real problems. We simply don't have the infrastructure to support the current demand, much less further increase in capacity.
    Piecemealing pilot and controller procedures will not work and may actually have a detrimental effect on the system. We can't improve capacity by changing the way pilots fly airplanes. We have to improve the environment in which they fly. We can do this by providing the pilot and the controller better equipment to do their jobs, a positive structure in which to work and adequate ground systems to support all-weather operations.
    I will be most happy to answer any questions you may have.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Captain Woerth.
    Mr. Schwitz.

    Mr. SCHWITZ. Good afternoon, Chairman Duncan, Congressman Lipinski, and members of the subcommittee, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to testify on the problems contributing to aviation delays. As the exclusive representative of over 15,000 Federal air traffic controllers, engineers and other specialists within the Federal Aviation Administration, NATCA brings a view from the Agency's greatest resource, its employees.
    The workers who make things happen or not happen within the boundaries of the domestic and U.S. Control oceanic airspace. As others have acknowledged, NATCA does also. Anyone who has flown recently knows it is no longer a matter of if the flight will be delayed, but why.
    Airline delays, as we all know, are at an all-time high. Passenger frustration is over the top, and predictably when something goes wrong, the blame game begins. This is where I would like to begin.
 Page 82       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Airlines have embarked on a well-financed campaign to blame the air traffic control system and, incidentally, the weather. For months a steady drum roll from airline CEOs and their spokespeople have flooded the media. Every poll reflects that no one for 1 minute believes this. Still, the unproductive blame game continues.
    First, the finger-pointing must stop. It is unfair for one segment of the aviation industry to place responsibility entirely on another just to save face with stockholders on Wall Street. Aviation is about far more than making money for airlines and their investors. It is about getting people from point A to point B safely.
    To that end, it is not only unfair, but untrue to say air traffic control is primarily at fault for hundreds of thousands of delays each year. Seeing this gives the impression controllers have alternatives about whether to hold a plane or not, alternatives beyond safety. Safety is, need I remind anyone, the controller's sole function. We go to enormous lengths to personally ensure uneventful passage for millions of fliers each year.
    Having said that, I must add that, yes, we do hold aircraft, but our decisions are not based on whether it will increase airlines' cost or fuel or whether their quarterly earnings will show a decline.
    In a moment, I will briefly outline the authentic causes of delays. But before I do, it is critical to accept that delays represent a multifaceted problem. They must be treated as a comprehensive, ongoing circumstance that offers no single or easy solution. In our industry, we have encountered this situation time and again. Free Flight comes to mind, as do runway incursions. In both cases, models for improvement present themselves for today's topic.
    Dare I suggest a multilayered, ongoing, minipartnered working group? Because of successes measured by these norms, NATCA today calls on all participants in the delay debate to establish and maintain the similar long-term work group. This will mean open, respectful collaboration from start to finish with everyone having a full stake in that partnership.
 Page 83       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    If we are actually going to work on delays, we must work together to resolve the problems. Only by carving the tremendously complicated process into workable fragments can we begin to get a handle on a viable solution, and that will take commitment, spelled with a capital C, from us all.
    Perhaps genuine collaboration is foreign to multibillion dollar conglomerates whose primary objective is making money. Their tendency is to see solutions in terms of corporate bottom lines. Solutions reflect this time and again.
    Certainly we are familiar with simplistic calls to privatize or reform the management structure of the FAA. It may read well in the headline format of newspapers or sound well in the sound bites in the world of television. But if the solutions to the Nation's ballooning aviation industry were that clear-cut, they would have been implemented long ago.
    Let me tell you about the obvious contributors to delays. They are heavy demand by travelers, scheduling decisions by airlines, bad weather, implementation of new air traffic controller equipment, still parts that remain of an antiquated system, plus policy and complex procedures. As you see, many delay factors are outside our control.
    First, let us review our crowded skies. Our domestic air traffic control system is the largest, most complex and demanding in the world. It is also the safest. Of approximately 630 million passengers, 630 million passengers traveling last year on commercial airlines, there was not one single fatality. This is no doubt due in large measure to the dedication and professionalism of the controller work force.
    Today, we are under extreme pressures to squeeze more planes into an already congested airspace. For the most part, we do just that, in spite of the fact we are operating with 2,000 fewer people than we did about 19 years ago. Contrary to popular belief, controllers are not rewarded or gratified by air traffic delays.
    Our motivation is to move aircraft as efficiently, safely and quickly as possible to their destination. The longer a delayed aircraft is in our airspace or occupies concrete on the ground, the more difficult our jobs become.
 Page 84       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Schwitz, I apologize, but we have a vote going on. So I have to allow you to continue your statement following a brief recess for us to go cast this vote.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. Sure, thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. We will be in recess for a very few short minutes.
    [Recess.]
    Mr. DUNCAN. I would like to ask the second panel to take their seats once again.
    And, Mr. Schwitz, you may continue with your statement and I apologize to you once again for having to interrupt you due to that vote that we had.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. No problem. You actually hit me at a good time.
    What I would like to do again is emphasize the sole function of controllers is to ensure the safety of the flying public. This will not be compromised to accommodate more passengers, more flights or more profits for the airlines.
    A second reason for delays is unrealistic hub scheduling. The inefficient hub-and-spoke system used by airlines to schedule flights is a major factor, like departure and arriving scheduling is at the discretion and control of the individual airline—not Congress, not the FAA, not air traffic controllers, not the pilots, not the airports and not the flying public.
    To maximize profits, airlines intentionally overload the system. Show me a major hub airport in this country, and I will show you overscheduling. Airlines want to reduce operating costs and maximize their revenues without regard for other airline schedules already slated for prime times, terminal airspace or airport capacity. It is like trying to cram 10 pounds of sand into a 5-pound bag.
    All scheduled flights will not be able to depart or arrive on time. We have repeatedly cited examples where even in good weather, there is no way all the planes scheduled could take off on time; that is because controllers must adhere to separation procedures. Airlines would rather have passengers sit on the tarmac with no space to take off, rather than lose money.
 Page 85       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Competition among airlines makes this situation even worse. As long as airlines continue to overbook runways, especially during peak hours, air traffic delays will continue and passengers will wait. Not including commuter service, airlines added about 600 daily flights this year. Cramming extra flights into an already-taxed system only creates congestion in the terminal airspace, on the runways and at the gates. Even if controllers today had the most up-to-date equipment, air traffic delays would not be eliminated. Controllers would simply be able to keep better track of the airplanes.
    A third and truly primary cause of delays is weather. Inclement weather has and will continue to play a significant role in air traffic delays, accounting for approximately 75 percent. Unfortunately, nobody but Mother Nature has any control here. As we—planes fly on a complex set of invisible highways in the sky. And I have got a video I would like to show when I get done here with intersections, speed limits, separation requirements and so on, when storms or inclement weather cause blockages or close one of these many unseen highways, air traffic bottlenecks, just like it does on the interstate at rush hour. Controllers must then reroute this traffic, and it can take hours to recover from a brief shutdown of one air route.
    Policies and procedures also affect delays. Separation procedures and applications are so complex that they defy an easy explanation in this setting. The FAA takes these safety procedures very seriously to the extent that both pilots and controllers fear unnecessarily harsh punitive actions.
    We would rather take a better-be-safe-than-sorry approach by adding distance between aircraft and go by the book and risk disciplinary measures when minor mistakes occur.
    Finally, I will get to the underbelly of the delay debate, modernization, a thinly veiled attempt by airlines to promote privatization of the FAA. Historically, NATCA has strongly advocated modernization of the air traffic control system. NATCA has been successful in making key points and today works with the agency on projects previously stalled or headed for failure.
 Page 86       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    It is no overstatement to say NATCA has been instrumental in turning the Agency around. We may now be assured that the 21st century will see many viable, effective advances that work with controllers and pilots, not against them. Again, I will refer you to written testimony that I previously submitted for details about specific equipment, installations and their impact on the 21st century. Suffice it to say that NATCA believes we will be phasing in important improvements over the next 10 years.
    Let me add parenthetically a footnote. The pace of building new technology cannot proceed much faster than it is already being tracked, regardless of whether the system is federally governed or privatized, partially or wholly.
    This leads me back to the NATCA solution. New equipment is a necessary step for ensuring safe, efficient travel in the future. It will not solve the problem of airline-created delays. Collaboration and teamwork have been instrumental in ensuring the success of well-documented DSR, STARS modernization projects.
    Working together—by that I mean the FAA officials, their staff, air traffic controllers, engineers—together we identified feasible and affordable solutions in these projects. We were able to make the necessary fixes for STARS and DSR in the air traffic control environment. And that is precisely what needs to be done in addressing the issue of delays.
    In summary, without expanding domestic airspace and airport capacity, delays will not only continue to increase, but they will reach the point of gridlock in the foreseeable future. Something must be done now to address this issue, because it is only going to get worse. It is time to stop pointing fingers, further dividing a splintered industry.
    Teamwork and collaboration, that is what is needed to develop and implement long-term solutions and the procedural changes to alleviate the air traffic delays.
    On that point I believe we all agree. Perhaps we can use it as a starting point for a longer, more fruitful examination and ultimately to solutions.
 Page 87       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I would be pleased to respond to your questions and if—I have got a video.
    Mr. DUNCAN. We are not going to do that at this point. Because we interrupted you, I let you go already about twice as long as other witnesses, and I want Mr. Chew to have a chance to go ahead and present his statement.
    So, Mr. Chew, we will hear your testimony now.

    Mr. CHEW. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the subcommittee, my name is Russell Chew, and as the Managing Director of System Operations Control at American Airlines, I would just like to say I am honored to have the opportunity to have a chance to present our views on air traffic control problem.
    First and foremost, American would like to express our appreciation for the tremendous support and personal attention that Administrator Garvey has given to this issue so far. By now I doubt anyone here would argue that our air traffic system did not experience a lot of difficulties this last spring and summer. And in fact in the last 10 years at our DFW hub, the five worst days in terms of cancellations due to air traffic control occurred in 1999.
    During the week of June 7 through 13 American was forced to cancel 642 of our flights due to ATC delays and over 75,000 of our passengers had their travel plans severely disrupted in that 1 week alone. I would like to go on and speak today about what is actually driving these delays and describe what American believes are fundamental elements of the solution. The principal challenge in addressing the U.S. Air transportation problem is the sheer size and complexity of the world's largest air traffic control system.
    The system is made up of billions of individual components and a myriad of technologies, overlaid by extremely intricate interdependencies between the people and processes. And although we recognize that we simply cannot design a program big enough or detailed enough to change the entire system overnight, neither can we ignore the problem or rely solely on short-term fixes. Time is short, and according to our research, the problems of the spring and summer will become much more commonplace by about 2005, even in good weather, unless we start to take action now.
 Page 88       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Now, to deal with a problem of this magnitude, we need to simultaneously maximize the efficiency of the current ATC system while redesigning that system to manage capacity growth that no one could have foreseen when this system was designed more than 30 years ago. The term ''capacity'' itself can be confusing, because in ATC's sense it is generally thought of as so many airplanes per hour through a given unit of airspace.
    In a business sense, capacity is measured in costs and the quality of service that is being provided; and one common way, one business measure of capacity is delay. But others include the predictability of that delay, on the flexibility of how we can use airspace to avoid delay, and the access to an airport facility or service.
    And it is really this definition of capacity that airlines are concerned about most. In the short term, if we improve the way we manage the current system—that is, if we reduce the capacity costs with better traffic flow procedures and automation, such as collaborative decision-making and conflict probe—we think that we can buy some valuable time, maybe 5 years.
    That time in turn can be used to make crucial progress on the long-term effort of system redesign, to increase real capacity. And by redesign I mean that airspace management 10 to 20 years from now will need to be quite different based on new capabilities and technologies that increase capacity. So while we support increased staffing levels and automation enhancements that needed to improve the way we manage airspace capacity in the short term, we realize that the long-term future of U.S. Aviation depends on securing funding for the research, development, procurement and implementation of new systems, programs such as Digital Voice and Data Link Communications, local and wide-area augmentation systems and automatic dependence surveillance broadcasts are absolutely critical in overcoming the inherent capacity constraints of today's system.
    The airlines are actively pursuing internal projects to improve how we use the ATC system today. And this committee had made important contributions to the long-term solution with its unanimous approval of Chairman Shuster's AIR-21 bill. Without a steady stream of increased funding that AIR-21 would provide, cooperative investments by airlines to fund modernization of our fleets would be impossible to justify.
 Page 89       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    But funding alone cannot solve the FAA management issues. From a business perspective, the Agency suffers from structural problems that even the best management team in the world would have difficulty fixing. Research that American has reviewed and conducted suggests that airspace capacity is not just a function of its design, but also related to how it is managed. We ought to adopt a system whereby FAA employees are rewarded for managing the air traffic system more efficiently while also improving safety.
    When it comes to productivity in our own business, airlines commonly expand by shedding costs that could be outsourced where possible. Now, there are two real good reasons for this. First, the outsource services are subject to a competitive market process which helps us to ensure that they are being properly valued.
    Secondly, outsourcing allows us to focus on our own core business; which is to say that we concentrate more on improving the services we provide, rather than those we use if the FAA only makes very limited use of outsourcing, choosing instead to expand its limited resources on maintaining its systems without the benefit of a cost accounting system to help them understand and control the cost of doing so.
    Now, in the airline business we succeed or fail by how well we know who our customers are, where and when they want to travel and how much they are willing to spend getting there. To control costs, we have evolved our cost accounting systems to continually scrutinize each and every product or service we provide, whether for internal or external use.
    We use our revenue management system to optimize the match between the price and the quality of our various products and measure the performance of the services that mean the most to our customers. Not only does the FAA not have any of these effective tools, but there appears to be no real consensus within the Agency as to who their customers are, what their customer needs are and what their internal goals should be.
    Now, there are always some who are afraid of change and will claim that either safety or jobs will be jeopardized. But many of us who live and breathe this business each and every day know that both the safety and efficiency of our system can be improved together.
 Page 90       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The present debate surrounding the ATC problem reminds me of the controversy that arose when supermarkets developed their laser scan bar code systems in order to reduce the waiting time in checkout lines. Before they were installed, a lot of people objected to the new systems, predicting that errors and cheating and confusion would ensue. But today some 30 years after that implementation, it is commonly accepted that these systems dramatically improve the efficiency by shortening checkout waiting time while simultaneously increasing the quality of service to the consumer.
    Now this analogy illustrates the conceptual difference between a business and the traditional approaches to coping with air traffic delays. Where the business approach asks, what do we need to do to make ourselves more efficient in order to meet—better meet the demands of our customers. The traditional approach would meter the number of people who are allowed to come through the first door, develop procedures to manage the long lines that are at the front door, and then tell the customers it is their fault for shopping at the wrong time.
    In ATC service, with an organizational and funding structure that is goal-oriented and promotes good management of its expenses and capital improvements to meet the needs of its customers, the airspace users will ensure that the airlines can supply the air transportation needed support, this country, economic growth opportunities, and job prosperity into the next millennium.
    Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Chew, thank you very much.
    And, Mr. Schwitz, let us go ahead and show your video at this time.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. Are you going to be able to see it from there?
    Mr. DUNCAN. We can see it.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. What you are actually seeing in this picture is a picture from the Command Center out in Herndon, Virginia. It shows all the air traffic flying in the system at 8:30 in the morning on September 28th.
 Page 91       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DEFAZIO. If he's going to narrate it, why don't you just mute it.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. If you want to just mute it, I can do that.
    Actually what you are seeing are small areas of weather that are depicted from what they—it shows you—to give you an example of what they see out in Herndon at our Air Traffic Command Center out there, you see the weather out in the central part of the country, and over towards the eastern seaboard you can see other areas. But this particular time, the weather, they had it set where only weather that—what we call level 3 or above would show up; that would be weather that most aircraft would be deviating around because of heavy precipitation or turbulence.
    This picture here is a sector within Atlanta Center that feeds the northeast arrivals, everything that comes in from the northeast into Atlanta Hartsfield airport, actually one of the areas that I work as a controller.
    Each one of the little alphanumeric things you see on the scope is attached to an aircraft; that is what we call a ''data block.'' now what you are seeing is all of the aircraft in Atlanta Center's airspace at 8:30 that morning. This is everything that controllers in Atlanta Center were working.
    Now what they are actually doing, you are seeing data blocks start to disappear off the scope, you will be seeing them getting smaller and smaller. What they will do is get to the point—Atlanta Hartsfield is located right here in the center of the screen, and it shows you all of these are arrivals coming into Atlanta at 8:30 that morning.
    This is focused in on the one arrival sector from the northeast that feeds the arrivals of what we call the ''Logan fix'' into the northeast, part of Atlanta's approach control airspace. Atlanta's approach control is basically a circle which you can see, the top corner of it here, at the bottom of the screen.
 Page 92       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    The areas that are being highlighted here now, which show up as small l's, that is what weather looks like to controllers in the en route environment. Quite a bit of difference from what you saw earlier from what is available to traffic management unit personnel out here at the Command Center, and quite a bit different again from what the airlines have for use in their operations, dispatch centers; and what the pilots also have is available in their cockpits with the weather radar displays.
    Actual spacing that you are seeing run at this time is about 10 miles between these aircraft. What you have to realize is not only—and this is only showing the arrivals. All the other aircraft that are in this airspace of controllers working, you are not seeing it, you are only seeing the arrivals.
    What you have to realize, at the same time all of these are going in here, they are being run 10 miles apart, you have a fix from the northwest, one from the southwest, one from the southeast, it is running just as many airplanes; and then the controllers at Atlanta tower, or the TRACON, have to take them, squeeze them in the holes that we have given them here, these 10-mile gaps. So basically we are giving them 10 miles between aircraft and they are taking three other streams and having to put all of these on two runways, and keep them at least 3 miles apart. And that is if all the aircraft are alike. If they are different, if we are getting into a heavy aircraft in front of a smaller aircraft, then we go to either 4 or 5 miles because of the way—the turbulence that Congressman Oberstar talked about earlier.
    So this is what we are faced with. It shows you the type of pressure that is being placed on airports. Atlanta is probably one of the most efficient, if not the most efficient, airport in the country at this time. It has also recently been named the busiest airport in the world in passenger traffic, as well as getting there and actual air traffic activity.
    And we can consistently run delays at Atlanta. Even on perfect weather days, we run delays because of scheduling activities at the airport. It is just there are too many there to get on the ground at one time. And as I said, it is probably the most efficiently designed airport in the country. If the rest of them were designed like that, we may run less delays than what we do now. But I think that the information that Congressman Lipinski read about the delay factor, Atlanta, I think it is 3.2 is what he said.
 Page 93       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Lately, we have been running a lot of delays in that area; weather is probably one of the biggest factors. We just happened on this day, there was some area in the area, but just to give you a good example of what it is looking like there on a given day.
    Mr. DUNCAN. All right. Thank you very much. And we will go for the first round of questions to Mr. Bass.
    Mr. BASS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    And just a quick comment, Mr. Chew. I am not sure your supermarket analogy—you don't have to respond if this really works, because there aren't any other supermarkets in the business of flying in ATC space. And if you have a bad price, you get a free product; if you have a bad direction on aircraft, you might have a crash. You know, I mean, it is really a different—we are talking about a different level.
    I think your analogy that it is a development of technology, and it is important to be able to live through some of the difficulties in the development of technology is a good analogy. But there are a lot of supermarkets out there, and there are also, by the way, a lot of problems with laser scanners; anybody who buys food knows that.
    But my question—I only have one—is, I guess, directed to all of you. It would appear as if scheduling is a problem in the issue of delays. And it is my understanding that in the early 1980s, the airlines got together under a grant of immunity from antitrust and were able to rearrange their schedules.
    Would this—would this be helpful, if the airlines were able to do this again and—or, on the other hand, do you think if such an event were to occur again, it might lead to anticompetitive results?
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, Congressman, first of all, I don't believe there has been another grant of immunity to deal with this issue. And I seriously question whether the Department of Justice would do that again. However, I would like to change the focus just a little bit and go back to what Congressman Oberstar told us, because we are really losing perspective on what is the cause of the problem.
 Page 94       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    As he pointed out, the total number of operations every day is five times as many as what the airlines have. We have 22,000 flights a day out of 100,000, and so not only did NATCA—nor did we. No one talked about the total number of flights per day, and this is where we start to really lose our perspective, because again it comes back to the FAA figures that I used where 7.5 percent of the delays are attributable to volume, and volume is where you put scheduling.
    And so we have really a systems problem. And, again, it comes back to not only my call for a summit, but also an even bigger problem, and that is, if we are really going to resolve the problems, all of us will have to work together on this. And I believe that can be done by the chairman and his leadership working with all of you and with all of us.
    Mr. BASS. Does anybody else have any other observations? You don't have to if you don't.
    Mr. Chew.
    Mr. CHEW. I would just like to address because we talk about delays, and like I say, it is a confusing subject sometimes, because we are really not talking about all delays; we are talking about acceptable delays. For instance, today it might be unacceptable for you—for me to tell that you are going to be late 4 hours, or 4 minutes, but it all depends on what—what situation you are in.
    If I schedule two airplanes at the same time, I am technically overscheduling the facility. But you are willing to take what little time there is to put two airplanes in this airspace at the same time. And the difference between two airplanes or 10 airplanes or 50 airplanes or 100 airplanes in an hour isn't how much the runway will hold; it is how much you are willing to wait for the use of the facility or the resource.
    Mr. BASS. I don't want to go on any longer, Mr. Chairman.
    Can I make an observation—and I don't quite know how to conclude this, but for example, in my area, in the Boston or northern—in the New England area, very congested area, you have Boston, you have Hanscom Field, Manchester, Pease Air Force Base, Portland, Maine. You might even have the National Guard Center down on Cape Cod. You have the Green Airport down in Providence.
 Page 95       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Is there anything positive to come from some sort of a—maybe a summit, of a different type, though, where —because scheduling is basically a catch-as-catch-can—the airlines decide where the demand is. And there are all sorts of factors involved, and they want to go to Logan, and everybody has to fly to Logan or Manchester, but there are good facilities and reliever airports around the region that could ultimately result in fewer delays, better safety; and frankly, commuters would be just as close to home as they might normally be to—with everybody concentrating in one specific airport.
    And I don't know where my question is leading, because I don't really know what the solution is, but somehow if we are going to be positive about solving this problem, we have to deal with the issue that you have a deserted airport within a reasonable distance of very, very busy airports and no mechanism whereby overall planning, long-term planning can occur.
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, Congressman, again it comes back to two points I would like to make. And, first of all, we schedule our flights based on the demand of our passengers. And if we change that time to try and deal with what is the perceived problem of too much scheduling at one time, those passengers will simply go to the carrier that takes off at the time they want. So that is a problem we deal with.
    But to further comment, some of our members fly point to point, others fly to hubs. Both make a lot of sense.
    The hub-and-spoke system as it has been set up has eliminated the need for approximately 100,000 flights a day that would take place otherwise in order to get people from point A through point B to point C. And so both have worked well, and I believe they will continue to. And you see Southwest, as an example, continuing to expand their point-to-point, while others are continuing to expand through their hubs. So I believe the mix is very important, and one that we will continue to have, that we can work on with you.
    Mr. BASS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
 Page 96       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. DeFazio.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just following up Ms. Hallett, on the point you made; I would just like to go into that a bit. You are saying the schedule is according to the demand of the passengers. I would take—as someone who has flown 2 million miles in the last 13 years—some issue with that. Twenty-eight years ago I could go to Portland Airport and I could get a nonstop to Hartford. I could get a nonstop to Providence. I could get a nonstop to Boston. I could get a nonstop to New York. I could get a nonstop to Washington, D.C., and there are probably other areas in the east, maybe in Portland, Maine. I don't know.
    Today those nonstops do not exist. So we are shoe-horning people through hubs, which are a creation of the industry and not of the FAA, and creating some problems with those hubs that now we are demanding be resolved. And I understand the realities of that, but let us not say that I demanded to fly through Denver with United to go to the East Coast. I did not, nor did millions of other people on the west coast of the United States.
    We would just as soon skip it, but we are not given that option, so just some slight correction there. You are saying, given the realities of the airlines hub-and-spoke system, you are trying to schedule times, departure times from certain places that are convenient to people, but it wasn't the demand of passengers that led to the creation of hub and spoke. And, yes, I hope point-to-point becomes a viable alternative. Again, it still isn't for most of us in the western United States outside of San Francisco or Los Angeles.
    So, maybe we can get back to the early 1970s some day in terms of passenger convenience, but it still seems to be a ways off. And I just wanted to go to that point because it also goes to a point Mr. Chew made, which dealt with checkout lines.
    You know, actually, oddly enough having done vocational counseling, I read early studies of the relative efficiency, and I think you ought to go back and review that. The big efficiency is not in the time a very competent checker could move people through the line; the big efficiency is in inventory control for the store. That is what comes out of those automated checking systems.
 Page 97       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    They have much better inventory control, but actually the initial time management studies of efficiency—granted, there were some less efficient, but then again I have seen people have trouble with the scanners, for checkers, the time difference was immaterial for checkout.
    So I just want to say that I understand the reality of business and what you are doing. But we have got to all kind of drop a little bit, and I think the air traffic controllers are a little bit too defensive. And I think the industry, particularly reading your testimony, is a little bit too blaming. And I think we all should back off a little bit and say safety is number one; and after we finish with safety and we make the system as safe as possible, then efficiency is number two.
    And I think we can all agree on those principles, and once we agree on those principles, I think we can start to work through some of this stuff and figure out how we are going to make it all fit together better. And I think we can.
    And I realize there wasn't a question in this, but it is an observation and a concern. I don't want to see us getting into our corners and saying, for example, the one you point to I think is a great point about that delay when the storms didn't develop, and that is what I was trying to get to with Ms. Garvey in terms of how we centralize control more, because certain en route centers tend to be more conservative than others.
    And there wasn't a real sort of uniform practice nationally, so I think we can do better. But I just really want to observe that our traditional roles maybe don't fit anymore and, hopefully, we can break through and cooperate. I want to see the best equipment; I want to see the safest operation. I want to see the people well compensated and not stressed out who are managing the traffic.
    I like it when the pilots are happy because I know that there is concern about that.
 Page 98       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    And so those are just my observations, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Sweeney.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to associate myself with the remarks of my colleague Mr. Fazio. I have to tell you, you have done something that no one in this town expects to happen ever and that is that you have united us in a bipartisan way with both of our concerns and really our dissatisfaction with the way the process is working.
    And I appreciate the call from each of you for collaboration, yet I know, as Mr. Fazio noted in his comments, that underneath all of that there is a lot of defensiveness and a lot of blame going on. And the folks who are getting hurt in this process, and our safety record is very strong, very good, right now.
    But the folks who are getting hurt fundamentally in the end when it comes to service are our constituents, are your customers, and we need to do something about that. Those concerns are growing. And we have heard it more throughout this year. I will get into a couple of specifics and not make some comments.
    Mr. Schwitz, you called for collaboration. And I noticed in your call, you said that the FAA engineers, the air traffic controllers need to get together. I will assume that it was only an oversight that you didn't say the airlines ought to be there, too, but I think the airlines ought to be.
    Mr. SCHWITZ. What I did, what I was hoping, which is mainly what I did was, I was giving an example when I mentioned those few individuals as to successful collaboration that had taken place within the Agency with the DSR and the STARS program. As far as resolving the delay problems, it is going to take the airlines, the pilots, the controllers, the Agency. It is going to take all of you. Everybody needs to get involved in this.
 Page 99       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. SWEENEY. Is it your association's position though that airlines scheduling is substantially to blame?
    Mr. SCHWITZ. Next to weather delays, scheduling would be what we see as the number two cause of delays in the system; that is 18 years of experience sitting there watching the system grow and working there.
    Mr. SWEENEY. There are those of us absolutely on the other side of this argument and those of us represent people who are in this underserviced areas. And although we are not happy with airlining for different reasons, and it relates to access and affordability, when the controllers blame airline scheduling as a substantial reason for the delay problem that we have, we become concerned that that means we will be further cut out of the process, which is where we feel we are right now.
    And, Mr. Chew, let me say I appreciated your analogy actually, and I appreciated your comments, and actually Ms. Hallett, this is directed towards you as well, but the airlines would have had greater credibility frankly if you were doing a better job of customer service. And I don't think the hearings that we have held so far this year have pointed out that anyone is particularly satisfied and would look at the airlines industry as a model for customer service at this point.
    I want to make that point and make it very loud and clear, and I would ask if you looked at—and you mentioned it in your testimony, that you looked at the airspace system and the redesign that is needed in the system, and you looked at the current system that exists. What recommendations have you developed at all and what have you looked at in order to redesign that system to better meet the needs, continue the safety requirements as a top priority, better meet the needs throughout at reducing delays and just providing service?
    What kind of fundamental structure?
    Because I, as Mr. DeFazio pointed out, believe having four hub spokes as a centerpiece to this system was just not—it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that it is going to be able to fulfill a growing need that exists out there.
 Page 100       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, Mr. Sweeney, I would like to try to comment on several of the questions that you have posed, and it will also help to respond to Mr. Fazio's questions as well.
    I would first just want to preface this by saying that we certainly should not confuse overscheduling with the huge increase in the number of passengers who are now flying and passenger traffic. And at the same time when we take a look at scheduling, and when we take a look at the hub-and-spoke system, one of the key advantages is that as there is more demand on the system. Obviously you are going to take small, medium and large communities, and that would really be 400 that you are talking about that are served by the hub-and-spoke system, and if the hub-and-spoke system were gone, many of those small communities would receive little or no service, or less than they have today, because you simply would not be able to move everyone from, let us say, Portland—.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Does a hub-and-spoke system have four
Hubs, and spoke airports work—service those four?
    Ms. HALLETT. Yes, it does. Let us take your hub.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Why not six?
    Ms. HALLETT. You could have six, you can have a dozen. But it has worked very well from an economic standpoint to have four, and that has, in turn, kept the prices down over the last 20 years since deregulation. Based on inflation, the price has gone down 36 percent overall for tickets.
    And so why has that partly happened? Partly because of the hub-and-spoke system where you are able to take someone from Portland and get that individual to Washington, D.C., whereas, while you and I both would like to have possibly five different nonstops a day, there is not sufficient passenger traffic from Portland to Washington to justify it. There is sufficient traffic to take people from Portland through Denver, and then those passengers can go to their destination, which may be Washington, Atlanta, Miami and Houston.
 Page 101       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    And so you are able to take one plane from the one point, and then you are able to—from the hub, take them on to their destination, being able to maximize the use of the equipment while you are also able to serve the majority of the people who want to fly. And this is a very important system that has worked. We have been able to achieve not only higher load factors, but our operating costs have been lowered because of the hub-and-spoke system.
    Mr. SWEENEY. Do you recognize it doesn't work in some areas, and that there are—because we do have what the FAA terms ''underserviced areas''—that there are still—this system is far from perfect, and that there are great concerns with the inability of the airlines to this hub-and-spoke system to really meet the needs of a substantial—.
    Ms. HALLETT. I think that is one of the reasons why we will also be seeing more—an increase, I should say, in the number of point-to-point flights that are being, again, not only put into service by Southwest, one of our members, but other—nonmembers as well.
    And I would come back to, what we are really looking at is the availability and the frequency of service that today exists for those some 400 communities that would not exist if we had to eliminate the hub-and-spoke system. And, unfortunately, more often than not, small communities that provide very few passengers would be the first to lose service. The advent of the RJ has been a tremendous boom, and while today there are 369 RJs in service, by the year I think it is 2002 or '3, we expect to have over 1,100 RJs in service.
    That will provide service to some new communities, more to other communities. So everything we are doing is to try and help the passengers.
    But I will also tell you that we get the majority of the blame because we are the ones that are picking the passengers up and taking them somewhere, even though we may have no control whatsoever over the delays.
 Page 102       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. SWEENEY. I yield back my time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. DUNCAN. All right. Thank you very much, Mr. Sweeney.
    Mr. Cummings.
    Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    Ms. Hallett, I was just curious about something. You know, you and Administrator Garvey seem to be coming from two different places. I just want to ask you about a few things.
    The Administrator, I think, painted a pretty upbeat assessment of the whole air traffic management in this country, and your testimony suggested that you disagree with that. I mean, can you explain to the committee why you believe that air management is on the wrong course?
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, first of all, Congressman, one of our points is that safety and efficiency are the two highest priorities, with the number one priority being safety. The efficiency, particularly with respect to the management of the system as it relates to weather, is where we disagree. And we may not disagree with Administrator Garvey on that, because that really remains somewhat silent.
    But what we are saying—and I again use the example I used this morning in my opening statement, and that is, on July 31st, early in the morning—the air traffic control people always get together with some of the airlines. They looked at the weather and that morning early, there was up to a 70 percent chance that there would be severe convective moments of weather in an area from Buffalo all the way to Kansas City.
    As a result of that, a decision was made to put ground holds as well as extensive miles-in-trail in place. That meant, just at O'Hare, 700 flights were delayed, 9,000 passengers flights were canceled, and yet by 1:15 in the afternoon that day, all of the convective activity south and west of Chicago O'Hare had stopped. There was not another lightning strike for the rest of the day, and yet the ground holds, as well as the miles-in-trail, coming from the West to Chicago and going west did not change. That was a management problem.
 Page 103       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. CUMMINGS. Well, you seem to also have suggested that if it were not a government-run situation that that may not have happened; is that what you believe?
    Ms. HALLETT. No, Congressman. What I am saying—first of all, we cannot move 1 inch from the gate anywhere in the air or back again on the ground until we get to the gate without the permission of the government; and that is something that we are not opposed to. But at the same time, we are saying it should be done more efficiently, and that comes back to the decision with respect to the ground holds that day or on other days.
    It must always be done with safety in mind. But when the convective activity is gone, then you should be able to adjust for that.
    Mr. CUMMINGS. Okay.
    Captain Woerth, you criticized the delay reduction initiatives put forth by Administrator Garvey and the airlines, saying they were designed not to fix the problem, but to fix the reporting of the problem. Can you explain that in a little more detail, please?
    Captain WOERTH. Are you talking about the reporting between errors—or potential errors between pilots and controllers? Or which aspect are you referring to, sir?
    Mr. CUMMINGS. That, yes.
    Captain WOERTH. Obviously safety is first, but we want to make sure that we also get the maximum efficiency. Every capacity program that we have ever seen needs a no-fault reporting system so that pilots and controllers in every environment can report all of the incidents within a system and without fear of retributions or firings or terminations or penalties. This will improve efficiency, because the only way we can truly find out what is working and what is not working is to have a no-fault reporting system.
    So we support all of those efforts that allow us to tell the truth in every aspect about what is going on with the system and make it better.
 Page 104       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. CUMMINGS. I join the chorus in saying that we are glad that you all agree that something has to be done, and needs to be done soon. And we need to work together to do it, and I hope that we do.
    Thank you very much.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Cummings.
    Ms. Hallett, I guess you partially responded in some of what you said to Congressman Cummings, but Mr. Schwitz has leveled some pretty serious, some pretty strong charges against the airlines in some of his testimony. And he said that he—and I suppose he is speaking for air traffic controllers throughout the country—that he feels the airlines are attempting to put too much blame on air traffic controllers, and he says some things about airlines are more interested in making profits and so forth.
    You heard all of what he said. How do you respond?
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, Mr. Chairman, obviously we believe that our number one priority as an industry is to provide the flights necessary for the demand of the passengers. It is the passengers who pay every single salary of all of the air traffic controllers, and the passengers expect to have safety and efficiency. We expect safety for our passengers and our crews. And we don't differentiate between the two, because they are all in the sky flying those—and flying in those planes.
    So it is a little bit distressing to hear that kind of a comment. But at the same time it is one of the reasons why we are calling for an opportunity to get together. It is why we are calling for the passage of AIR-21, because if there is more money needed for controllers or if there is more money needed for equipment, it will finally be available.
    Ms. HALLETT. It is already there in the trust fund, but now it will be available. And so, rather than pointing fingers, we need to look at the opportunities, and you have presented to us an opportunity that I would hope the rest of the Members of this great Congress would agree is a very huge step towards bringing about a solution that will make it better for all of us but particularly for those passengers who are paying the salaries, who are demanding service, as well as the need to keep this economy strong. And it is because of those passengers and the ability to keep this airline industry going that we have a strong economy.
 Page 105       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. The 21 recommendations that you helped the FAA come up with, are you seeing some good things come out of those recommendations, and do you feel that there are other things that could be done if we had an ATC summit and other big improvements that could be made?
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, first and foremost, the best thing that has come out of this is the focus that Administrator Garvey and Monte Belger have placed on this. This is at the highest level of the FAA that they have participated. This has all been brought together by not only the airlines and the FAA but the ATC folks as well. So that is a very high and key priority.
    And is it working? I honestly think, Mr. Chairman, it is too early to say yes, it is working. I would also say that, in the overall scheme of things, this is going to be a very small part of it. It is really the air traffic system that needs to be fixed, and not only has Captain Woerth talked about that, certainly Russ Chew has talked about the ATC modernization, that the whole NAS structure is what we are talking about for the future, because the demand will continue to grow. By the year 2010, we expect a billion passengers to be flying, and so we can't sit here and talk about little fixes for today and tomorrow, we have to do that while we are developing the plan for the future.
    Mr. DUNCAN. I was conferring with counsel, but did I understand you correctly to say that you feel there are 400—did you say 400 small communities that would not have air service?
    Ms. HALLETT. Small, medium and large—that is not just small. But the hub-and-spoke system—and, incidentally, I know that the Congressman referred to four, there are actually 15 hubs with spokes that support those hubs in the United States. But what I was saying is, without the hub-and-spoke system, the 400 small, medium and large communities in this country would see their air traffic completely change, their air transportation services completely change, and it would be for the worst, not for the better, because they simply would take thousands more airplanes to be able to provide that service.
 Page 106       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    And while we have 29 million square miles of airspace, it still would be a problem, being able to provide that service without the hub-and-spoke system.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Did you say 100,000 more flights?
    Ms. HALLETT. Yes. If we eliminated today the hub-and-spoke system and simply did everything on a linear basis, that means that we would—it would require 100,000 more flights a day to reach the demands of the passengers that we have.
    Mr. DUNCAN. And you said there were 300-something regional jets now, but by the year 2003 was it?
    Ms. HALLETT. Yes, today we have 369 regional jets. In 2 years, we expect that to double. And by the year 2003, it will be up to approximately 1,159 regional jets operating. That is based on current firm orders.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Captain Woerth, I want to read some words to you that you wrote in the September, 1999, issue of your union's magazine. You said—quote, if U.S. Policymakers really want to know what is needed, all they have to do is read the steering committee's report, referring to the Free Flight Steering Committee report.
    Would you just go into that a little bit and tell us what you meant by that and what you feel people would find if they read that report?
    Captain WOERTH. Yes, sir.
    Mr. DUNCAN. I am not familiar with that report. I know what Free Flight is, but I haven't seen that report.
    Captain WOERTH. Rather than go through—the entire report, since as I think the Congressman from Oregon pointed out, it's a technical document, and a lot of those documents aren't that user friendly. If you don't use all of these acronyms and work with them frequently, it may be not the most easy reading you ever had. But let me give you what I think is the best part of the report.
 Page 107       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    This RTCA process that is directed by the Free Flight Steering Committee, is doing something that is good. It is pulling together aviation community needs to produce a consensus of all of these different users and competing users. One of the problems we have had before when we didn't have industry and governemnt consensus—and I heard—this in your comments earlier we put a lot of money into the system before, but we have done it kind of piecemeal because we lacked consensus and an overall systems approach.
    In a way a lot of people who may not be familiar with our airline industry have made the same mistakes when they built office systems and computers and phone lines. When you do it piecemeal, you get a situation where the computers didn't talk to each other, the phone system didn't work with the computer system, and you spent a lot of money. Everybody in the office didn't agree in what they really needed, and you had things you didn't need, and it didn't cooperate with everything else.
    What the RTCA Free Flight steering process has done is really ground out all the different users needs and put together a consensus proposal. The process is also required to define the financing that is needed to support modernization so that we can have something that is realistic and actually doable.
    And I am hopeful that in the work that your committee has done and that the House of Representatives has brought forward, we have a chance to build a system of air traffic control in this country that will support this free market approach to business that deregulation has attempted to produce.
    So instead of arguing, and I don't think anybody wants to get into any more, like you said, blame games, is it the airline's fault, is it the controller's fault, or pilots not doing all they can do. Let us build a system that a successful country and a successful economy can support which lets the market determine where the passengers can go and all the communities can get served.
 Page 108       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    We have outgrown the present system by our success as a country. Now we need another system that can support future success. The Free Flight Steering Committee is a good blueprint of how to build a working consensus that is practical and doable. We have the finances available—through—I want to emphasize—through proper use of the Aviation Trust Fund. It is hard to get money out of the present budget process, but I commend all of your courage for trying to take the Trust Fund offbudget so we have the means to finance the proposals that we have.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, as you say, the blame game doesn't produce solutions. We need to go further than just the blame.
    Do you think it is common that airlines cancel flights for economic reasons and blame it on weather?
    Captain WOERTH. Blame it on weather? There are so many reasons a flight maybe canceled, that it is very difficult for me to give you a direct answer. I mean, there are so many factors that go into that equation—regulatory requirements on crew pairing, crew flight and duty times, maintenance schedules and connecting passengers just to name a few. Somebody makes a decision with so much information on any given day, so I really couldn't tell you how many flights, if any, were cancelled for pure economics.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Yes, Ms. Hallett wants to say something.
    Ms. HALLETT. Well, Mr. Chairman, I would just quickly say that, if a flight is canceled, that plane still has to get to the next destination, and so to say that it has been canceled for an economic reason, the economics make no sense, because you are—it doesn't make you any money to deadhead a flight with a crew to meet the next schedule where that flight is due.
    And so I know there is a lot said about this, but we just should keep in mind that that equipment is constantly in use, and it has to get to the next point.
 Page 109       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, I think it very seldom happens, if at all. But I do know that some people seem to think that it happens more than it does, I think.
    Mr. Schwitz, you seemed a little hostile toward the airlines in your statement or angry with the airlines. Do you think it is possible for the controllers to get together or work with the airlines to try to improve what you said in your testimony is a very bad problem that is only going to grow much, much worse?
    Mr. SCHWITZ. I think I also called for that in my testimony. It is time to quit pointing fingers, for all of us to get together and work all of these issues out. We took offense with the stuff that is being said.
    Controllers are very prideful of the job they are doing, and they all think they are the best at what they do. When they saw the stuff that was coming out from some of the CEOs, from some of the airlines, they took great offense to it. When you talk about the air traffic control system to a controller, you are talking about the job that they as an individual do. And I heard a great outcry from our membership that was—you are going to sit back, we are going to do nothing about this? You better get out there and respond to it. And respond we did with exactly what they give us with the information to respond about.
    I mean, I have got reams of information in my office from the major airports in this country, saying here is what is being done to us; here is what we are faced with on a daily basis. And, you know, I have told them it is time—okay, we know we have got a problem, now it is time to fix it.
    To date, we have had one airline approach us and ask us for our assistance, and that is Northwest Airlines. And myself and my president Mike McNally will be attending their headquarters up in Minneapolis the end of this month to work with them. To me, that is a start.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Well, that is good.
 Page 110       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    You heard Mr. Chew talk about paying people for results that are improvements or incentive-type things. I know that your group is very much opposed to privatizing air traffic control. But do you think that it is possible without privatizing the system to set up some kind of incentive or bonus-type situations where the air traffic controllers would be paid more, if they met certain goals, that would always—in other words, everybody, no matter what their job, should always be striving to try to be better at it from year to year.
    Do you think it is possible to set up some type of incentive or bonus-type system that, if we improve the air traffic control system from year to year, that—in other words, you might work in some sort of free market elements into the system?
    Mr. SCHWITZ. With the classification system that we just agreed upon with the Agency, that is exactly how it works. The more airplanes we work to get off the ground, on the ground, in and out of our airspace, the higher level of pay at those facilities in the country. So the busier the facility, the more pay those controllers work. So it is to my advantage and our membership's advantage to work as many airplanes as we possibly can, because it means I take home more money to take care of my family.
    Coming up with other types of incentives, I mean, some of the stuff we are talking about right now with the Agency is a gain-sharing type program, to come up with those kinds of suggestions, performance-based initiatives that would improve the systems. So I think that maybe we are already doing and talking about some of the things that you are suggesting.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Chew, recently Mr. Crandall, who used to head American Airlines, and Gordon Bethune of Continental have said that they feel that really the only way to really reduce the delay problem and make significant progress is to privatize the air traffic control system. Do you think that that needs to be done? Do you think we need to do something similar to what they have done in Canada? What is your opinion on that?
    Mr. CHEW. I think there are a lot of models to look at, and I don't think we really know what the answer is right now. What we do know, and as Mr. Schwitz said, is that we are trying to change things incrementally and probably will find our way through that. We don't believe that there is any one change that you can turn the switch and have the system improve overnight, whether it is a business change, a structural change or a technology change.
 Page 111       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    What we do know is we need to move in that direction. And I think that the—what you hear from year to year about corporatization, privatization, performance-based organization, whatever you want to call it, is all moving in that direction. And we are in support of anything that moves in that direction, with the caveat that we must retain the elements of safety and continuity and predictability of the system.
    Mr. DUNCAN. But you said that you think the problem is really serious now, but you also said something similar to Mr. Schwitz, and I think this is a problem. And I think you said by 2005 that we are going to have bad problems, even if we fix that. Is that what you said?
    Mr. CHEW. That's correct.
    Mr. DUNCAN. So is it fair to say that you are not satisfied with the—when you say things are moving in this direction or that direction, are you saying that we need to make more or faster or more progress than we are making in terms of that?
    Mr. CHEW. I think what happens, in our opinion, because we participate on a Free Flight Steering and the Select Committee and all the committees American Airlines have deemed important to participate to collaborate with all of the users—so I think it is a collaborative process to actually find the solution. What we find is that there doesn't seem to be enough resources to support both improvements we need to make now to get some short-term improvements and delay that 2005 date to 2010 or 2012 so that we have time.
    Because to actually re-equip fleets of airplanes and 22 air traffic control centers, it will take many, many years. And if we concentrated only on the long-term, we wouldn't be able to—we would have a problem in 2005. If we can do both at the same time, which I think is possible, then I think we are buying ourselves time. But we have to—we have to do both now. We can't say let us make the short-term improvements, then when we get all of those done, we will fund the long-term improvements. We have to move in both directions at the same time.
 Page 112       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DUNCAN. I liked your statement in which you said that safety and efficiency both can be improved at the same time, because an efficient system is inherently safer than an inefficient system.
    Well, Mr. DeFazio.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Ms. Hallett, I would just like you to provide the analysis on the point to point 100,000 flights. I have got to say over time, and no offense to you, that one of the problems I have with ATA is they tend to speak in absolutes and I would like to see the analysis.
    And the other thing, you are really going to have a really hard time convincing the gentleman from New York or me that the service in 400 cities would deteriorate, because both of our cities under the old system—of course, you would say everything has changed—but under the old system we had more air service, and we are not the cities that have also benefitted from lower ticket prices. It costs me 400 percent more, four times as much, to fly to Eugene, Oregon, as it does to Portland, Oregon, 112 miles apart.
    Of course, the difference to me is, to save that money, means I am driving down the freeway at 9 o'clock at night, and I am on East Coast time in the rain and in the dark for 112 miles, but that is deregulation and competition. And I see more and more business people and other people forced to go to Portland, because there isn't a free market in the smaller cities. They tend to be dominated by one airline and the price differentials in the hubs, and the small cities are dominated by one airlines. They are not the people who have seen airline tickets go down in real terms. They have seen a dramatic increase, and they have seen a decrease in service.
    So, again, I would just caution that the absolutes don't work real well with some of us who live in those cities, and there are quite a few members of this committee who live in those cities—for example Mr. Boswell, who isn't here today and others who can raise those concerns. So I would just say that, you know, that is problematic.
 Page 113       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DEFAZIO. If we had a truly free market, with free entry and no predatory pricing and all that, I do not think we would be having some of these problems. We do not, and we have to try to deal with that world.
    But we do not feel well-served. Businesses do not feel well-served and the CEOs of local multinational corporations in Oregon, the local guy at Sony, could carry on and make me look moderate, or the travel agents I talk to, about our one big airline that flies in and out of Eugene.
    My wife thinks I am sort of raving just because I spend 2 million miles on United. But we had dinner with a friend whose wife is a travel agent, and she made me sound like a moderate when she went on about what they were doing to people in our community, which used to have four airlines and now it has one-quarter.
    So to just talk in those absolutes, it is difficult. And maybe some day we will benefit from the new system, but we have not seen it yet.
    Ms. HALLETT. Mr. DeFazio, I would like to provide that for you, and I would also point out that my first flight into Eugene, Oregon, was in 1955, when I started my freshman year at the University of Oregon, and United Airlines was the only airline that was flying there then. Lots have changed in these many years since.
    But I will point out that since deregulation, when it took place in 1978, there were approximately 250 million Americans flying, and today we have 650 million going on up, and it has changed this picture forever. But with the customer service plan that we adopted voluntarily this year, again a lot of our problems go back to the delay issue, and your discontentment and that of many others is in no small parts because of the delay issue, but it will not change the fact that if you do not have sufficient passengers to fly from Eugene to Washington, D.C., you will never have point-to-point service with an insufficient number of passengers. But I will get that material to you.
 Page 114       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC    Segment 2 Of 2  
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Ms. Hallet, you are just like throwing me red meat, and I am going to resist it because I have someone in my office.
    Ms. HALLETT. Please, we are more than willing—.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. But I see nothing in the voluntary stuff that the airlines should not have already been doing, and if they were not already doing those things, I am appalled. And to say that that was a big step for passenger rights—.
    Ms. HALLETT. Did I say it was big?
    Mr. DEFAZIO. Well, you said it was a step.
    Ms. HALLETT. I said it was a step.
    Mr. DEFAZIO. I have to take some umbrage with that. And I was not on a big tear on delays. I was talking about price and service. And perhaps you got to the University of Oregon 14 years before I did, but by the time I got there, and into the '60s, '70s and '80s, we had a number of airlines, and they did compete, and prices were more reasonable, and there were other contingencies.
    It is a fact of life. I fly to Eugene on United Airlines four times as much as flying to Portland on United Airlines. It is hard to explain that except that they dominate that market.
    Mr. DUNCAN. All right. Well, I think we have gotten a good start on this issue.
    Ms. HALLETT. The summit will help.
    Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.
    [Whereupon, at 1:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

    [Insert here]