Man, sometimes my work blog writes itself. Remember how horrible this year has been for air traffic delays? Hours spent stuck in planes, missed connections, that kind of thing?
Turns out the FAA knew perfectly well ahead of time that it was going to happen, and they just ignored it and let it happen anyway.
Scope out this article on the FAA's web site (below the fold):
In the virtual world of airplanes and airports that exists—much like Second Life or The Sims—only in computers, the record delays of this past summer happened years ago.
The 12 members of the FAA's Capacity Modeling and Analysis Group saw it coming. The team, based at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, N.J., has studied every large and medium-sized airport in the United States, using numerical models that simulate the movement of aircraft from the air onto taxiways and runways. Their job is to provide the information necessary to recognize what procedures and characteristics (e.g. gates) cause congestion and delays in the nation's airspace and airports. Just what to do with that information is up to the airports.
Years ago, the Analysis Group foresaw the record delays that would occur in summer 2007...
That's pretty remarkable. The only thing I can figure is that the internal PR flacks who did up the story didn't really realize that they are essentially admitting a few important things with this story.
First, that the FAA knew ahead of time that the delays were going to skyrocket this summer.
Second, that they didn't do anything to take action to prevent it.
Third, that the bottlenecks in the system aren't in the AIR- they're on the ground, at the airports. They come from the movement of the aircraft FROM the air onto the runways and taxiways. (For example, RVSM doubled the useable enroute altitudes and airspace for the vast majority of commercial airliners, yet did nothing to help delays. The problem isn't enroute, folks.)
The FAA and Marion Blakey (and now Bobby Sturgell) and the big equipment manufacturers have been running around selling everyone- Congress, the users, the contractors, you name it- on the idea that we desperately need "NextGen" to fix the delay problems of the future.
The air traffic controllers that hear about this stuff say to themselves "sure, okay, airspace improvements are great, but the REAL delays are at the airports, aren't they? Why aren't we paying any attention to that?"
Well, folks, the reality is this: The FAA DOES have good employees who are freakin geniuses with computers. They can and have modeled not just airspace, but also airports, runway and taxiway configurations, and so forth. These simulations predicted this year's delays LONG in advance.
It's just that the FAA didn't do anything about it. Why not?
Well, that would screw up the whole NextGen push, wouldn't it? Along with the push the ATA and Marion made to shift the costs of the system off of the airlines (as if they're going to lower costs to passengers!) and onto private and business aviation users that don't clog up the monster-delayed airports?
That stuff wouldn't sell NEARLY as well if the FAA had said "hey, we're going to do something about these delays, so JFK and EWR and LGA and the other overscheduled airports, here's your new slot numbers, no more than this per hour" and the delays had never happened.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're talking an ultimate con game. They create the problem, then pitch the "solution" to the artificially created problem, then agree to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on that "solution", then run off and get cushy high-paying jobswith the very contractors that are selling the not-yet-invented equipment that's supposedly going to solve the artificially created problem.
Oh, and if they can contract out as many government jobs to for-profit companies, break the labor unions, and screw thousands out of their pensions while scoring great jobs for themselves, and implement an Ayn Randian nightmare of "every man for him/herself, no governmental interference or safety standards type of policy at the same time, and direct tens of thousands of FAA dollars to their wivesand friends, why not go for that, too?
And then after the problem appears, hold a press conference where the Decider Guyacts like he's all concerned about it, announce how the problem is going to be fixed, and everyone laughs all the way to the bank.
The agency's employees see all this, and we here at the Follies shake our heads at the audacity of the people who are running this con job on the American people.
Wake up, folks. We're not making this stuff up; and the scumbags are getting away with it, and they're doing press releases to announce what they're doing!
I don't much care where you stand on the whole NATCA/FAA problems. This is beyond that, although it's brought to you by the same people, so that should give you a clue who's telling the truth and who's playing games there.
This is about billions of taxpayer dollars. This is about ethics violations. This is about intentional lessening of safety standards, about graft and corruption that's become so institutionalized, nobody pays much attention to it. It's just business as usual.
Well, we need to change that. Get fired up. Write or call your Congressman and Senators. Tell them you don't give a damn about party affiliation or political ideology; you just want to know why the FAA knew about the 2007 delays ahead of time and didn't do anything.
Tell them you know the delays aren't in the air and instead of spending billions on equipment that isn't even developed yet (of the 8 key capabilities identified in NextGen planning, exactly none can be fully implemented with today's technology; much of it still needs to be built and tested or even designed!), it'd be much wiser to go to the true experts on aviation- the FAA's employees- and deal with THEM fairly and get THEM to come up with the solutions we need.
Do something. Don't just sit there, okay?