[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 119 (Tuesday, September 14, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10825-S10827]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              CONGESTION AND DELAYS IN AIR TRAFFIC SYSTEM

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, there is a very famous line that we 
all know from the heroic astronauts of Apollo 13. The line is: 
``Houston, we have a problem.''
  Today, many of us who have spent the August recess traveling to our 
home States and various places across the country also realize that we 
``have a problem'' in the air. This problem is not only in Houston, it 
is in Atlanta, it is in Chicago, it is in Cleveland, it is in Detroit 
and in nearly every other city across the country.
  Over the last month, there have been very troubling reports of 
unprecedented increases in congestion and delays in our national air 
traffic system--long hours of delay. I have not heard a speech in this 
Chamber about this in the last several months. We spent most of 
yesterday having, I guess, basically a political debate about the 
Puerto Rican clemency situation, but this is urgent in a very different 
way because it involves life and death, the national economy, and 
congestion which is beyond the scope of thinking of many of our fellow 
citizens.
  We are not talking about merely an inconvenience. We are talking 
about a potential crippling of the national economy and, if ignored, we 
are talking about extremely serious safety issues.
  I happen to be an admirer of FAA Administrator Jane Garvey. I think 
she is very good, and I think she is tough. She ran an airport in 
Boston. That is a tough thing to do. I have a lot of confidence and 
faith in her. She canceled her own summer vacation plans because the 
crisis was so bad. She stayed in Washington to work with the 
controllers and with the airlines on this enormous congestion problem 
on which I will elaborate in a minute.
  Beginning in mid-July, the FAA and the carriers conducted an on-the-
spot evaluation of about 33 different facilities across the country in 
the air traffic control system. That is the one which routes our planes 
hither and yon; they better be right.
  In this evaluation, they came up with a short-term plan for reducing 
delays and for improving some inconveniences. It is really too soon to 
say how effective it will be. I am glad they did it, but we cannot draw 
any final conclusions from it.
  Everybody involved with the plan seems to agree that these short-term 
fixes are nothing more than that--short-term fixes. They are meant to 
address symptoms of an underlying problem which we in Congress 
consistently fail to address, which is an air traffic control system 
that must be modernized--but we will not do it, nor put up the money 
for it--restructuring within the FAA and other areas in order to meet 
surging travel demands and remain viable, as they say, into the next 
century.
  Of course, while this serious problem-solving effort was going on at 
the FAA and its facilities during this summer, we in the Congress, and 
especially we in the Senate, have largely or virtually--totally, I 
should say--stood by. We have watched. We have not even commented. We 
have simply watched or in some cases even looked the other way. Lack of 
concern? Too complicated? I do not know.
  We continue in this same vein that we have approached aviation for 
more than a year now, ignoring the problem, ignoring the cost, ignoring 
the solutions, ignoring the complexity, by avoiding the issue and 
refusing to make the time to debate it in a serious way.
  We left for the August recess without even bringing up FAA 
reauthorization or the airport improvement program reauthorization. 
That is our most basic aviation responsibility. That is our bottom 
line. We failed to do it. In fact, we all went home knowing that the 
airport funding program was going to lapse. And, of course, on August 6 
it did.
  Some would have you believe that the FAA reauthorization bill is so 
mired in controversy that we just cannot do it--not a matter of not 
wanting to do it; we cannot do it. I am here to tell you--and to 
implore you--that most of the bill is entirely resolved and that the 
remaining issues require only some healthy debate, a measure of 
compromise; and if we will only make the time, we can certainly get all 
of this done and need to this month.

[[Page S10826]]

  I understand that the majority leader and the Democratic leader have 
been working very closely on this matter, on doing just exactly that, 
having us work on it, finding the time to bring the FAA bill to the 
floor. It used to be that an FAA bill did not have all that much 
significance. Actually, that is probably not a true statement. Today it 
has overwhelming complexity and significance to it.
  Senators Hollings, McCain, Gorton, and I are doing our very level 
best to work out as many of the remaining issues as we possibly can so 
the bill will go smoothly and quickly on the floor. And we believe that 
it can, if given a chance.
  But the important thing is that we get going, is that we do 
something, is that we bring it here, is that we discuss it, is that we 
are educated by it, by some of the facts that surround it because the 
consequences of inaction are growing very dangerous.
  Some facts:
  The Air Transport Association reports that air traffic control delays 
were up 19 percent from January through July of 1999 and 36 percent 
from May through June of 1999 as compared to the same periods in 1998.
  With an average of 1,358 aircraft delayed each day from May through 
July as a result of something called air traffic control, and an 
average of 106 passengers per aircraft, the Air Transport Association 
estimates that 140,000 passengers were delayed in America each day from 
May through July of this year--140,000 passengers each and every day.
  For the first 5 months of 1999, as compared to the same period in 
1998--a 1-year difference--delays increased at Detroit 267 percent; at 
Las Vegas, 168 percent; at Chicago Midway, 158 percent; at Cincinnati, 
142 percent; at Dallas/Fort Worth, 131 percent.
  ATA reports that 625 million in passenger minutes of passenger delay 
each year costs the economy over $4 billion annually and results in 
passengers being delayed 28,500 hours each day on average--with the 
numbers going up every month.

  And 72 percent of the delays are weather-related, they say--it may be 
true, it may not be--but that does not mean that the weather is so bad 
that we cannot avoid gridlock on our part.
  We can, and we must, continue to invest money in training and 
staffing, in paying for advanced automation tools to enable controllers 
to work around bad weather and minimize disruption to the extent that, 
in fact, they would be able to if we were willing to fund them and to 
give them the possibility of doing that. This technology and this 
capability exists at this instant and should be improved upon for 
tomorrow.
  Before we jump to blame the FAA for all these current problems, I 
should be very clear that I believe the carriers also share some 
responsibility, as do we in Congress, again, particularly in the 
Senate.
  FAA reports that traffic increases are greatest in the Northeast. 
That is not a surprise; that is where a lot of people live. And it 
appears to be the result of several factors: a stronger economy; the 
influx of regional jets, which fly at the same altitude but not nearly 
as fast as the big jets, so it complicates the way planes can be 
maneuvered; significant deliveries of new aircraft to major carriers 
that have to keep them flying--they have no economic choice to begin to 
recoup their investment, even if fewer flights would meet their 
customers' actual needs--the efforts by a couple of the major airlines 
to develop low-cost/low-fare operations along the eastern seaboard to 
compete with Southwest on point-to-point routes; and in some cases 
excessive airline scheduling.
  For example--and I see my good friend, the senior Senator from New 
Jersey--only 48 arrivals are possible each hour at Newark Airport in 
very good weather. But for marketing purposes, individual carriers are 
scheduling 55 to 60 arrivals at Newark Airport during the exact same 
hours. This happens at hub airports all across the country and 
effectively guarantees delay no matter what the FAA, no matter what the 
controllers might want to do.
  Allow me to begin to finish with a quote from the latest major study 
of the system, the broad system, by the National Civil Aviation Review 
Commission in 1998. The Commission's warning is compelling and has been 
affirmed by the industry, affirmed by the Department of Transportation, 
the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Gore 
Commission on Security and Safety, and everybody else who works in or 
on or with aviation.
  Their quote:

       [W]ithout prompt action the United States' aviation system 
     is headed for gridlock shortly after the turn of the century. 
     If this gridlock is allowed to happen, it will result in a 
     deterioration of aviation safety, harm the efficiency and 
     growth of our domestic economy, and hurt our position in the 
     global marketplace. Lives [will] be endangered, the 
     profitability and strength of the aviation sector could 
     disappear, and jobs and business opportunities far beyond 
     aviation could be foregone.

  So given all of this, I say that we do not just have a problem at 
Houston but we have a problem all over America.
  What more do we need to know before we are inspired to act? Must we 
wait until the gridlock is upon us? Are we waiting for some 
catastrophic event? Are we waiting to be shot out of our inertia? That 
is what we have been doing here in the Senate for some time. And does 
it have to come to unnecessary deaths? Sometimes that happens in 
America. People don't pay attention until there is something so 
horrible that they want action.
  That is not what we want to happen in the Senate. We are given the 
responsibility for aviation policy--our section of it. We have an 
authorizing and appropriating process. We have not been exercising it. 
We have been consistently underfunding the most basic aspects of our 
aviation system. We know it, we will not change it, and we do not talk 
about it.
  We simply cannot continue to sit on our hands, waiting until it is 
``convenient'' to start the debate. We are underinvesting in our system 
to the tune of at least $6 billion each year--$4 billion short on air 
traffic equipment and technology, an instrument of safety, and $2 
billion short on airport infrastructure and capacity improvements. 
These are just the funds needed to keep us going at the current, 
entirely unacceptable rate and not to improve our situation but just to 
keep us where we are. I trust my words have convinced my colleagues 
that I do not believe that is sufficient.
  So closing this $6 billion annual funding shortfall doesn't even 
begin to modernize and do what we need to do in the aviation system. 
That is a sensitive subject, and $6 billion is a lot of money. We don't 
like to talk about spending that, but we will get nowhere in aviation 
without it.
  Without getting too much into some especially contentious differences 
between the House and Senate aviation bills, let me state the obvious 
about this apparent funding gap. We all know there is money in the 
aviation trust fund that could and should be used. There are any number 
of ways to do it. We could take the trust fund off budget; we could 
firewall the revenues; we could simply spend more on the discretionary 
side for critical and growing needs in our aviation infrastructure. The 
point is that we have to make a commitment to fix and improve this 
system, and it is going to take money to do it. We cannot avoid that.
  So today, I say to colleagues, it is time to talk about the needs of 
the FAA, time to talk about the needs of the aviation system. We cannot 
simply go on to conference on a blank bill, and I don't think that is 
the intention anymore. We can't write the bill in conference. We can't 
do this without debate or without input from this body. Thankfully, 
this week I am beginning to feel cautiously optimistic about our 
ability to work together to get this bill to the floor. Frankly, we owe 
it to the traveling public and to the tireless air traffic controllers. 
I don't know how many of you have watched these folks work and looked 
at the equipment with which they have to work. It is a shocker. In some 
cases it is stunningly wonderful, and in some cases it is shockingly 
poor.
  At some point, underinvestment in something as important as what will 
carry a billion passengers in 6 or 7 years--our aviation system--will 
catch up with us. I fear that day is already upon us. The consequences 
of continued inaction are terribly real--real for public safety and 
real for our national economy. So let's go forward and take

[[Page S10827]]

the work that our majority and minority leaders are now talking about 
and get to this bill.

  I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
  Mr. SHELBY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama is recognized.

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