Aviation: Saturated Sky

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While Government and industry groped for ways to alleviate America's aerial arteriosclerosis, the traffic jam in the skies shifted from acute to chronic. The glut that has all but congealed the New York City metropolitan area's "Bird Cage"—Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark airports—now spreads confusion across the country and abroad, shredding connecting schedules in Los Angeles and squeezing service in Miami. Fortnight ago, "Black Friday" choked the Golden Triangle between New York City, Chicago and Washington with 2,079 delays. Black Friday now is every day. The situation cannot possibly get better before it gets worse.

Chicago's O'Hare, the world's busiest commercial airport, sometimes was logging two-hour tieups. One frustrated Detroit-bound passenger decided to drive instead—and almost beat the plane. An English tourist in Los Angeles sampled U.S. airline hang-ups and threatened to take a ship home through the Panama Canal. A pilot flying from Bermuda to New York advised passengers on takeoff—accurately, as it turned out—of his three-hour flight plan: "Two to get there and one to circle." American Airlines reported that the previous week's average 88-min. delay at Kennedy rose last week to one day's average of 3 hr. 14 min. on the Chicago-to-New York run. Before the crisis, rush-hour delays at Kennedy averaged 30 min.

Picking Up the Slack. Pilots circling in tortuous holding patterns quickly exhaust their maximum allowable filing time. National Airlines by last week had canceled vacations and slashed 64 flights from this month's schedule. Northeast Airlines scrapped eight in one day. Last year delays cost the airlines $50 million. This year, in the Golden Triangle alone, they are hitting $1,000,000 a day. Uncounted—and largely unnoticed—additional losses come from air-cargo delays. New York Customs Broker Jack Hyams said that Kennedy Airport has freight stacked up "practically to the runway," with three-week delays for some local deliveries after shipments have been landed.

Charles C. Tillinghast, president of Trans World Airlines, last week called for industry-wide sessions on the crisis. He suggested shifting rush-hour flights to outlying terminals. More drastic was his proposal to end rush hour itself by changing schedules. By week's end the Civil Aeronautics Board authorized the talks. Airliners soon may be diverted at peak hours from congested airports, and passengers on peak-hour flights may have to pay premium rates. The industry blames the glut partly on private planes, but barring them from major airports would hardly dent the crush. At Kennedy, they make an estimated 10% of the flights. New York City's three major terminals at last count had 162 scheduled flights in and out bet veen 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. each day.

3-D Slot Track. Obviously, solving aviation's crisis will take vast amounts of money for new airports and equipment, and far more aerial traffic cops than the 14,000 controllers the Federal Aviation Administration now has in 340 terminals and 27 centers across the U.S.