On the surface, things looked much better this year for long ground delays, and really, they were. There were three flights that sat on the runway for more than 3 hours during June 2010. In June 2009, that number was a whopping 278. This year, none sat for more than 4 hours. Last year, it was 42.

So did cancellations spike as a result? A little, but not much. Though the DOT would like you to think that both this year and last saw no change at 1.5 percent of flights canceled, that’s only thanks to rounding. In 2009, it was 1.48 percent. In 2010, it was 1.50 percent. So there was a very slight increase. In fact, three fewer flights were canceled this year but with 6,307 fewer flights operating.

Sounds like a tremendous success, right? Well, it’s good news for some, but it’s important to look at other factors year-over-year to see how we may have ended up in this place.

First, we have to remember that after last summer, the airlines did ramp up their efforts to reduce lengthy ground delays. So some of the reduction should be related to previous efforts and not simply the introduction of this rule. We’ll never know exactly what that is. But we can still dig in and see what happened last June. You’ll notice that the weather was significantly better, despite what many have said.

The Air Travel Consumer Report doesn’t give specifics on the flights that were delayed for three hours, but it does do it for the flights delayed more than 4 hours. So let’s focus on those. There were 42 of those, and most of them occurred during specific events. For example, 13 of them (11 at Dulles) happened in Washington on June 3, 2009. That’s the day that thunderstorms came and sat on top of Dulles from 8p to 10p.

So the weather was bad, but something had to be just as bad this year, right? Nope. In June, there were a couple days with quick passing storms, but the only day that saw sustained thunderstorms over a long period was June 28 when storms sat on Dulles from 145p to 3p, still a much shorter time period, especially when you’re looking at a 3 hour limit.

But the key is the time of day. I looked at flights scheduled on August 12, 2010 as a comparison. Not much should have changed between last year and this year. Between 145p and 3p, there are only 29 flights scheduled to arrive and 15 scheduled to depart. That’s an average of 23.2 arrivals per hour and 12 departures per hour during the time of the storm. Meanwhile, between 8p and 10p, 82 flights are scheduled to arrive and 32 scheduled to depart. Think about that, that’s 41 arrivals per hour or 16 departures. That’s a significant difference.

On top of that, the imbalance of arrivals to departures is huge at night. That’s because a lot of planes come in and stay the night before flying out in the morning. That means that the gates are full at night, so if planes don’t push back to depart on time, then arrivals have nowhere to go. That’s not usually the case during the day. And don’t underestimate the 2 hours of storms this year versus 1.25 hours last year. That’s a huge difference when 3 hours is your cutoff.

There were a couple other events we could look at in June 2009 as well, but I could paint a story for those too. I think the point is clear. Knowing that thunderstorms tend to be the biggest culprit for long ground delays during the summer, June was a luckier weather month in 2010 than it was in 2009.

That being said, even if we had the exact same weather this year, I would bet the performance would still have been better. Simply being more cognizant about the situation would have reduced the number of ground delays, but that’s going to have happened even if this rule didn’t exist.

The bottom line is that the DOT can’t have it both ways. If it wants to just use superficial results to advance its claim, go right ahead. But then don’t tell people who do more in-depth reviews that it’s too early to look at the results. This is a far more complicated issue than either the DOT or the pro-rule people want to admit.

Don’t get me wrong. This was just a dumb thing to do. It sounds like at least one of the controllers had a kid or two on a school break, so he brought them up to the tower. That’s a huge thrill for any kid (especially dorks like me), but if that’s all that happened, I don’t think this would be plastered on the nightly news. No, it’s when the kid took over and made some transmissions to airplanes that the sh*t hit the fan.

Like I said, that was a really dumb thing to do, especially since these guys will be lucky if they somehow still have a job, but I think all these people flipping out about it just need to chill out. If you listen to the kids’ transmissions, they sounded very professional to me:

Kid: Don’t be a fool, JetBlue 171, you know what a landing like this means, you more than anybody. I’m ordering you to stay up there.
JetBlue 171: No dice, New York. I’m giving the orders and we’re coming in. I guess the foot’s on the other hand now, isn’t it, kid?

See? Harmless. Ok, so maybe that wasn’t exactly what happened. It actually was far more boring than that:

Kid: JetBlue 171 contact departure
JetBlue 171: Over to departure, JetBlue 171 . . . awesome job

Oooh, scary. The world is gonna end! As Rob Mark wrote over on JetWhine, “The kid never controlled anything. He said the words his dad told him to say, nothing more.” (You can listen to the tapes here.)

That’s the reality here. If the kid wasn’t quick enough or some sort of situation developed, you know that the controller was right there ready to take over. There wasn’t any harm here, and I really don’t think there could have been. The pilots clearly weren’t concerned.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy loses his job and that’s a shame, but I understand it. People are going crazy over this, so somebody’s head has to roll. He screwed up, so now he’s going to have to pay. Bummer, because I thought it was pretty damn funny.

Today, I’m going to talk about Required Navigation Performance (RNP), a form of Performance-based Navigation (PBN), and what it can do to help airport arrivals. But instead of defining it in boring terms, I’ll look at a recent implementation high in the Andes to show how you can benefit from it.

RNP allows airplanes to fly precise, complex approaches without the need for any ground-based navigational aids. Today, the use of Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) hampers the ability to run complex approaches in some areas, because difficult terrain prevents these ground-based systems from adequately guiding the aircraft. Consequently, when visibility is bad, some of these airports see serious constraints.

One of those places is Cusco, Peru. Here is a picture I took looking east after landing there last year:

It may not look like much, but consider this. That runway is about 11,000 ft above sea level. It sits in a dead-end valley with only way good way out. As you can see, those mountains go up pretty quickly. And by the way, this view is actually of the GOOD way out of the valley.

Airplanes fly in from the west, descend into the valley, and then do a sharp loop to land back toward the west. It was a fairly dramatic arrival for us, though the clear blue skies made it seem routine. Combine that complexity with gusty winds and fog or rain and you’ve got one incredibly tricky arrival.

In fact, it’s so tricky that you’ll never experience it. When the weather gets bad, flights get canceled. Until now. LAN Peru, the largest operator at the airport, recently finished testing a system from Naverus that allows it to fly an RNP approach into the airport.

The added precision of the RNP approach allows LAN to fly with more accuracy on a very complicated approach, and that means they can land safely in lower visibility situations.

This isn’t a new thing. Alaska, for example, first tested RNP flying into San Francisco several years ago. When the fog rolls in, SFO has to spread out its arrivals because the two runways are too close for comfort using existing systems. Just imagine if SFO could actually operate at normal capacity during foggy days thanks to more precise approaches. Delays would disappear from the airport.

This is just a glimpse of the future. There are other systems that can have similar results, and of course there are other pieces of NextGen that impact other phases of flight. When you hear buzzwords about NextGen and RNP, this is the type of thing that will eventually be possible. If you’d like to learn more, take a listen to this podcast on the subject. (It’s a little dry, but the information is good.)

How often do commercial airline flights fly into areas without any radar coverage?

Where are these areas that lack radar coverage?

Tom

It may surprise you to know that most of the world is not covered by radar. Part of that is a technical challenge. Our air traffic system runs on ground-based radar, and most of the world is covered in water. It’s kind of hard to plant something that’s ground-based into the ocean. For that reason, once you’re more than a few miles off the coast (as was the Air France aircraft), you’re going to be out of radar range.

But even over land, radar coverage isn’t always stellar. For example, there has been much discussion about Brazil’s gaps in radar coverage over the Amazon over the last few years.

So is this a huge problem? Well it’s certainly not ideal, but it’s not dangerous either as long as proper procedures are being followed.

Look at the North Atlantic, for example. That is one incredibly busy area every single day with tons of traffic going between the US and Europe. So how do they handle all that traffic without radar? They introduce inefficiencies to keep planes far apart.

First of all, the North Atlantic operates under a track system. So every night, winds are taken into account and certain tracks are used by all airplanes. Eastbound and westbound airplanes fly different tracks at different altitudes – it used to be 2,000 ft differences but now it’s been reduced to 1,000 ft. (Those vertical separations are used over land as well.) They also have started to fly a mile or two off-center of the track to provide even more protection from a mid-air collision. There is also greater separation introduced between airplanes on the same track to give them some leeway.

So as you can see, it’s not dangerous but just slightly inefficient. It is important, however, to note that weather radar is a different story. Every commercial jet flying has weather radar to help it avoid storms regardless of whether it’s over land or ocean.

One of these days, we’ll finally have GPS systems throughout the fleet that will fix this issue once and for all. But we’ll talk about “NextGen” in another post.