Airline Crisis Looms

It took me 27 hours travel time to return from Bali and the UNFCCC. Part of the time was spent circling the skies over Los Angeles. A rainstorm had moved in and the LAX air traffic controllers had to stack planes in the air and bring them in one at a time.

Across the country at New York’s Kennedy International Airport (JFK) the U.S. transportation secretary was getting ready to announce that her department had negotiated an agreement with the airlines to ease congestion at that airport. The agreement: to reduce the number of flights per hour at Kennedy. In the future, they might also auction off landing slots.

Nearby Newark Liberty International Airport was worried that JFK’s overload would blow back on them. They warned the transportation officials not to “fix J.F.K. and break Newark.”

Before I left Bali, a friend told me that my flight back to the U.S. would add the equivalent of driving my car for 30,000 miles. Is it true? At the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, there were only a few Side Events that talked about the global warming emissions from marine and air transport. There were also suggestions that they would tackle that problem more seriously by 2012.

They may not have to wait that long for the airline industry to implode. Along with congested airports in the U.S., rising incomes in the developing world means that millions more people are becoming frequent flyers. In Asia, like Europe, flights to exotic locations are sometimes as low as $49 each way.

There are now so many people flying, worldwide, that the airlines are facing a serious pilot shortage. The Indonesian newspaper, Strait Times, reported that the best pilots are being lured to top airlines by higher paychecks, leaving the lesser known airlines to put whoever is available, in the drivers seat.

They reported, in fact, that it takes little more than passing a drivers test in  Canada, for someone to pass the airline pilot text.

There is another crisis looming that no one is talking about yet, and that is the advancing age of the air traffic controllers at U.S. airports.

Currently, an estimated 75% of air traffic controllers are within five years of retirement. Back in the Reagan Years, when they went on strike, then President Reagan simply resolved the dispute by firing them all. New air traffic controllers were put in their seats … and they were all about the same age.

The message here: get your traveling done now, then settle down. The skies may not be so friendly a few years from now.