As domestic and international carriers gather this week to hammer out ways to reduce congestion at Kennedy International Airport in New York, the role of regional jets will be very much in play. After all, the FAA and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have targeted regional jets, blaming them for congestion and calling for upgauging of aircraft away from the 50-seat birds. In a recent report that was part of Congressional testimony and its Annual Report, the Regional Airline Association (RAA) set the record straight, saying that narrowbody movements outnumber RJ operations at New York airports. While carriers have been ordering and deploying larger regional jets, the bulk of the fleet is still 50-passenger jets. Related Story
“Large narrow-body aircraft (150-199 seats) are leading worldwide commercially-scheduled seat growth and, in the congested New York City area, narrow-body departures outnumber RJ departures by nearly 30 percent,” said the organization.


The meeting takes place this week – called for October 23 and 24 – will discuss schedule cutbacks to alleviate congestion at Kennedy. The scheduling meeting is part of a two-pronged approach to address chronic New York delays, DOT Secretary Mary Peters said. In late September, Secretary Peters charged the Aviation Rulemaking Committee to report to President Bush by December on delay reduction proposals to be put in place for the 2008 summer travel season. She said the administration expects the committee to develop a series of sustainable, market-based solutions to New York-area delays, but made it clear the department will act to reduce schedules if necessary to ensure fewer delays next summer.
“Our first choice is to find market-based incentives to fix delays so we can preserve passenger choice, but we will consider imposing scheduling restrictions as one option to avoid a repeat of this summer’s delays,” Secretary Peters said.
After restrictions were lifted by Congressional mandate, airlines at JFK, which used to subject to the High Density Rule, increased their scheduled operations by 41 percent between March 2006 and August 2007, Secretary Peters said. As a result, the number of arrival delays exceeding one hour increased by 114 percent in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2007, compared to the same period the previous year. During the first nine months of fiscal year 2007, the average daily operations at JFK increased 23 percent over the same period in the previous year. Travelers experienced an average twenty-six minutes of gate arrival delay per flight, which is an increase from the average eighteen-minute delay during the same period in fiscal year 2006. The on-time arrival performance at JFK declined from 70 percent in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2006 to 61 percent over the same period in fiscal year 2007.
The Secretary added her department also is working to strengthen and improve consumer protections. Those plans include immediate measures to provide travelers with better information about delays, increase the amount of money passengers receive when they are involuntarily bumped from flights, update consumer complaint systems and increase oversight of chronically delayed flights.
The talks will include international carriers, according to Reuters, which said the meeting will be a first for international carriers and the second for domestic carriers which met to resolve similar problems at Chicago O’Hare before FAA imposed new restrictions there last year. Related Story www.aviationtoday.com/ran/categories/commercial/5192.html
Preserving passenger options is what RAA will be counting on as it enters the meeting. It has vehemently denied that regional jets are to blame for congestion. Blaming regional jets for congestion is an urban legend said RAA President Roger Cohen in recent testimony. Related Story
“Instead of demonizing RJs, historians will likely look back at the regional jet as the transformational jet of this generation,” said Cohen. He noted regional flights accounted for less than five percent of the 1,041 daily flights at Kennedy. “Regional aircraft today represent just about half of the daily schedule. [During] the evening rush hour aircraft of less than 70 seats represent only 25 percent of the departures, so there are fewer RJs during JFK’s busiest period than at other time of the day.”
Now, in a new study, Regional Airline Access to Airports and the Air Transportation System, explains the unique role of regional jets while setting the record straight about the number of regional jets flying into hubs.
“Some policymakers have advocated the artificial manipulation of demand for air travel – rather than keeping pace with it – as an appropriate solution to the current capacity constraints,” said RAA. “Unfortunately, this solution is one that ultimately fails the traveling public. The problem is not the influx of regional jets but rather a failure to ensure our airports and air traffic control system keep pace with user demand. In fact, regional airlines are just one part of a larger system with a very big problem.”
RAA said airlines are using regional jets and mainline aircraft to meet consumer demand. “Both [RJs and narrow-body] aircraft types are appropriately sized to enable passengers to travel where they want to go and when they want to go,” it said. “Overall industry growth represents the health of an increasingly strong and vibrant airline industry. Rather than artificially constraining demand for the system, the focus should be on expanding capacity to meet user needs.”
The organization said that although regional airlines have shown huge growth in the past decade, that growth has slowed and is expected to remain slow through 2008. “While the number of passengers flying on regional airlines increased by about 2.5 percent from 2005-2006, the number of regional airline flights declined three percent over the same period of time,” said RAA, noting that regional aircraft seat capacity is naturally trending upward. “In other words, while smaller aircraft are still a vital part of service in smaller markets, larger regional aircraft are now being deployed on routes where additional market demand justifies additional seating capacity. In fact, over the past five years, the average seating capacity of the regional airline fleet has grown by over 30 percent.”
Limiting regional aircraft at hubs could disconnect as many as 70 percent of the nation’s airports from the national air transportation system, said RAA, noting that passengers at those points pay for the system they would be denied under such limitations. “Not only would passengers traveling to and from those communities suffer, mainline carriers would experience fewer flow passengers, decreased market presence at spoke cities, and diminished ability to compete at hub airports,” said RAA. “This hub feed is critical not only for the spoke cities, but for the system overall, since network carriers depend on these markets for 27 percent of their passengers. In fact, 21 percent of domestic passengers travel in markets that produce fewer than 50 passengers per day.
“No passenger should be denied access to the system he or she has helped to fund because of a failure to modernize and expand the ATC system beyond ‘highways’ to enable flights to operate safely throughout the sky,” RAA continued. “Instead, the U.S. air traffic control System must receive the resources and oversight necessary to expand and modernize. We must move forward on the transition to a satellite-based, air navigation system referred to as ‘NextGen,’ which is better suited to meet long-term passenger demand. In the interim, the pursuit of additional incremental capacity must remain a top priority.”
RAA also said congestion problems are also caused by airport capacity constraints. “Proponents of demand management have prescribed a ‘quick fix’ for airport congestion by advocating the replacement of multiple flights on smaller aircraft with fewer flights on larger aircraft,” it said. “Under this same logic, advocates of demand management suggest the RJ — long seen as a desirable presence at spoke airports — should be barred from or operationally limited at hub airports. Unfortunately, these proposals not only disenfranchise small community passengers, they are rooted in a fundamentally flawed logic that incorrectly blames regional jets for congestion at busy airports.”
The congestion and delay problems are of the industry’s own making since the FAA lifted the high density rule on January 1 under congressional mandate. In addition, since spring 2006, JFK’s traditional role as a hub for international flights has changed owing to the increasing use by domestic airlines, including JetBlue and Delta. The HDR limited aircraft operations at JFK during the five hours of peak transatlantic demand--3:00 p.m. through 7:59 p.m. local time. Since the expiration of the HDR, the FAA reinstituted caps at O’Hare, by rule, and at LaGuardia, by FAA order.
“During the morning hours, JFK routinely incurs volume-related delays during the 7:00 a.m. through 9:00 a.m. hours. The afternoon and evening demand at JFK now exceeds the airport’s optimal capacity until nearly 10:00 p.m., denying the airport a late-day period to recover from congestion-related delays,” said the FAA in its meeting announcement. “In addition, the relatively pronounced arrival and departure banks that historically characterized JFK’s operations are now supplanted by mixed arrivals and departures during peak hours. Although JFK has four runways, it is limited, at most, to a three-runway configuration [owing] to the shared airspace in the New York area. JFK’s maximum efficiency is achieved using either two arrival runways and one departure runway or two departure runways and one arrival runway. The recent mixing of arrivals and departures throughout the day reduces the benefit of optimizing the configuration of active runways to favor arrivals or departures, as appropriate, which is a practice that air traffic control personnel previously employed to tailor JFK’s runway configuration to the historical transatlantic traffic flows.”
After working with airports, carriers and other customer representatives, the FAA began a number of short-term fixes to improve the efficiency of airport operations and the air traffic control system, especially during periods of adverse weather when the effects of over-scheduling are more pronounced. However, its airspace redesign, which opens additional arrival and departure routes in the New York area, has generated considerable opposition from residents not previously subject to aircraft approach and departure noise. “These measures alone, however, are not expected to provide sufficient near-term gains to accommodate the peak hour schedules at JFK’s current or forecast levels of demand,” said FAA.
Of necessity, the meeting will only discuss domestic schedules, since international schedules are ruled under a process defined by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Canadian operations are considered domestic based on an agreement with Canada, said the FAA. The FAA has already initiated steps under the IATA process to manage the scheduled operations of foreign air carriers at JFK that are complementary to the scheduling reduction meeting.
FAA will be setting up a new web site 48 hours before the meeting naming the peak periods of operation at the JFK and the FAA’s targets for flight operations during those periods. It expects to publish its final order in time for the summer 2008 season. The order is expected to be effective through at least the summer 2008 scheduling season and may restrict service during peak hours by all carriers, including carriers that are not currently operating at JFK. Additionally, the FAA is considering appropriate measures to address charters and other unscheduled flights at JFK. Under the HDR, unscheduled operations were severely constrained during the afternoon hours at JFK. Specifically, only two unscheduled operations were permitted in each afternoon hour other than the 1700 hour, when no unscheduled operations were permitted. Likewise, unscheduled operations at O’Hare have been restricted to four per hour since the imposition of Arrival Authorizations at that airport in 2004.