After a 10-year struggle to update a 40-year-old airspace design, FAA announced its final decision for redesigning the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia airspace. The new plan is expected to ease the $46 billion in delays imposed on the economy in just three years. This includes estimated costs to airlines and passengers, loss of service, and more than 200,000 lost jobs in aviation and other industries.
While airlines serving the Northeast and the Air Transport Association hailed the new plan, the Associated Press (AP) reported New Jersey Democratic Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez denounced the plan, saying it would result in only minimal improvements and increase noise. The AP also said Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said neighborhoods in his district north of New York City will now hear up to 600 flights per day above their homes. The FAA predicts that more than a half million fewer people would be exposed to noise under this plan than if nothing is done, one of the four options the agency considered. However, several protests have already erupted from those newly impacted by the new traffic design.
The plan opens new departure routes affording controllers the ability to route planes around bad weather. In addition, new routes include more direct flights into the New York area with more efficient spacing as controllers vector aircraft for arrival more than 100 miles out.
The inefficiencies addressed in this plan could yield up to $9 billion dollars in benefits to air carriers, passengers, and local businesses in 2011, when the plan is scheduled to be fully implemented, according to the agency. Once implemented, it is expected to reduce annual operating costs (largely fuel consumption) by $248 million and severe weather delay costs by another $37 million.
The new design combines high-altitude and low-altitude airspace to create more efficient arrival and departure routes. This plan integrates the airspace surrounding the metropolitan areas and expands the use of more efficient separation standards. This alternative will also allow the FAA to move more rapidly toward satellite-based technology. The airspace redesign involves a 31,000-square-mile area over New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut with a population of 29 million.
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FAA expects the new program to reduce delays, complexity of the current air traffic system, and fuel consumption as well as carbon emissions and aircraft noise. On any given day, one-sixth of the world’s air traffic flows through that area which is expected to grow to 15 to 20 percent by 2011.
For the past 10 years, airports in New York — LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International — as well as Newark Liberty International and Philadelphia International have ranked as the most delayed in the nation. This redesign would develop new routes and procedures to take advantage of improved aircraft performance and emerging air traffic technologies. The redesign would not include physical changes or construction of new facilities.
The redesigned airspace will save approximately 12 million minutes of delay annually. Since the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia areas will handle a great deal of the nation’s air traffic, it will also help smooth out traffic across the nation. Benefits, in the form of reduced delays, are estimated to reach 20 percent by the year 2011.
The FAA studied four alternatives over the course of nine years, including taking no action to change the 40-year-old design, before making its final decision. A second alternative would have modified current routes and procedures to improve efficiency while a third would have created an Ocean Routing Airspace, moving all Newark flights over the Atlantic before making their final approach or turning toward their destination. That alternative was proposed by the New Jersey Citizens for Environmental Research.
The plan being implemented was considered the best to meet the purpose and needs of the project. The Integrated Airspace integrates the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control’s airspace with portions of surrounding Air Route Traffic Control Centers’ airspace to operate more seamlessly.