FLYING INTO TROUBLE

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The FAA intended to build a custom computer network from the ground up and consolidate 230 terminal and en route centers into 23 facilities. The system was designed to be phased in over a 20-year period, in a building-block approach with five segments. Through all this, only the first segment, the least complex of all, has been partially completed. The FAA is still years away from fielding any major new equipment. Because of these delays, the FAA has had to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the antiquated systems at terminal and en route centers--the ones I saw in 1974 (when I visited an en route center as part of my flight training) should already have been phased out or replaced--running for even longer. This equipment was never expected to handle air traffic beyond the late 1980s. Now the FAA says it can last through 2000.

The danger posed by the outdated air-traffic-control system is compounded by a shortage of the special radar needed to help planes cope with bad weather.

Pilots know that weather causes about 40% of aircraft accidents and about 65% of air-traffic delays longer than 15 minutes. Thankfully, technology can defuse the threat. Doppler radar can predict and pinpoint rapid, dramatic shifts in wind by bouncing beacons off different air masses.

Today most people think that Doppler radar wind-shear-detection systems have been installed in every airport. In fact, only 16 are installed and working. Some $350 million worth of parts for Doppler wind-shear-warning radar (promised after a horrible 1985 crash in Dallas) moldered away when truckloads of equipment went to dusty warehouses instead of to the airports most in need. Other systems are installed but haven't been switched on. Seven of the remaining 47 scheduled for production haven't even been delivered.

Yet in the years since the Dallas crash, other wind-shear accidents have cost passenger lives. Two unsolved crashes in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have been tentatively attributed to wind shear that might have been avoided with Doppler radar. After a USAir flight crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 1994, the NTSB said the delay in installing the radar had cost the lives of 37 onboard. Charlotte was supposed to get the radar system in early 1993. As an airport in the South (where wind shear is particularly common), it was No. 5 on the FAA list. But the inevitable delays, red tape and land squabbles pushed Charlotte to No. 38, leaving the USAir pilots defenseless against the weather.

OUR "BOMBS" GET THROUGH

In 1993 I learned that the FAA's abhorrence of action extended to airport security. Plainclothes agents from my office sneaked into some of the 19 busiest airports in the U.S. They wandered around in off-limits areas, seldom challenged by airport or airline employees. We saw other people milling about without proper identification, and they weren't stopped either.