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Speech

New York Scheduling Meeting

Good morning, and thank you all for coming. Let me underscore the Secretary’s comments. JFK delays have reached epidemic levels, and unless all of the parties step up, far worse is in store. We can’t let that happen. The situation isn’t going to fix itself. We’re here to initiate a process to bring things back into line at JFK.

The passenger doesn’t like to wait — at the counter, on the tarmac or in the air. When the President said, “Enough is enough,” he was right. We’ve got to make it happen. With the players we’re bringing together, we can do it.

For our part, the FAA is working actively to improve its operations. We’re now asking the carriers to work with us on the difficult decision to reduce schedules during peak hours until we find ways to add further capacity or reduce delay.

By now, how we got here is clear. Operations this year at Kennedy have increased to an average exceeding 1,200 — up 20 percent from last year. In August, the average daily operations exceeded 1,300.

Delays likewise have continued to grow. On-time arrivals dipped from a high of 68.5 percent last year to just slightly over 62 percent. That 6.5 percent means more people missing meetings and missing connections. When we talk about 1,200 to 1,300 operations every day, each percentage point is significant.

The bottom line here is that the afternoon and evening hours were scheduled beyond capacity even in ideal weather. Departure delays and taxi times routinely exceeded an hour in the evening. When you add the morning rush to all of this, you create a situation that can whiplash up and down the east coast and across the country for the rest of the day. In many ways, the schedule for the rest of the nation is at the mercy of what happens in New York every morning. We’ve got to get things right at Kennedy.

We’ve asked more than 20 different parties to come in to help work this out. What we want is for the passenger to have a reasonable expectation that a schedule means something. This isn’t a debate over a reasonable delay. We’ve got to fix scheduling that’s unrealistic.

For our part, we’ve published the record of decision for the airspace redesign — a long time coming. The initial stages will be implemented soon. And we plan to have several changes in place by the middle of December. We’ve also accelerated the deployment of ASDE-X, which will be in place this summer. And, we’re working on efficiency and other operational issues.

As you know, we also have an Aviation Rulemaking Committee in place, designed to cover the entire New York region. We expect results from that group by December 10.

As the Secretary noted, the ARC issues are related to the scheduling targets. Until the ARC reaches resolution, the intent is to preserve market-based options within these targets. We also have to decide whether and when to limit unscheduled operations. And, we have the IATA scheduling process in a few weeks. I’m also concerned about the spillover effect on Newark.

So, I see these next two days as the beginning of an intense scheduling dialogue, which will likely continue parallel to the ARC for a period of time.

In closing, we asked the airlines before to step up when we did Growth without Gridlock, and they did. We asked carriers to cooperate when we had trouble in Chicago, and they did. JFK is more complex, but I’m sure that together we can find a solution. Thank you.