U.S. Needs An 'Interstate Runway' Program
By Herbert D. Kelleher / AW&ST, June 4, 2001
(Presented with permission of the author)
The competition and lower fares produced by airline deregulation have enabled many more people to fly, and to fly more often, for both business and personal reasons. When I first started working on the creation of Southwest Airlines, only 15% of adults in the U.S. had ever flown on even one commercial flight. Today, that percentage is around 85%. The number of domestic trips by air has increased by more than 200% since deregulation in 1978. Thus, economic deregulation of the airline industry has enormously increased passenger demand and placed the convenience of flight within the reach of most American citizens, just as desired and predicted.
It was never anticipated, however, that the supply of airport capacity would remain fundamentally stagnant as deregulation unleashed consumer demand. The money is available, both in the form of airport passenger facility charges and in some $3 billion per year from passenger excise taxes devoted to the Airport Improvement Program. But the political will to build more runways has been startlingly absent.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently compared the electricity shortage in California to the runway shortage in America: If we don't allow electricity generating plants to be built in California or runways to be built in America, how, he asked, can we feign surprise and indignation when our lights go out and our flights are late?
John Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., testified that we need only 50 mi. of runway concrete--or about one-fifth of the distance between Dallas and Houston--to dramatically reduce flight delays in America. The Texas highway department probably could pave that 50 mi. in six weeks.
Our nation and all of its businesses and people desperately need that 50 mi. of runway in order to have a competitive, productive and convenient air transportation system, which, ever since America invented the airplane, has been our strength and glory in competing against the rest of the world. That system also has provided all of our people with a better and far more enjoyable quality of life.
What do we need to get that 50 mi. of concrete? We need, in effect, the recognition and declaration of a national economic emergency. Productivity of airplanes and airline employees is being seriously eroded; the productivity of the passenger is being steadily impaired; and the increased costs occasioned by runway delays are inexorably producing much higher fares and shipping costs. There are about 4,600 large commercial airplanes in service in the U.S. If 4,600 manufacturing plants sat idle for several hours each day for lack of electricity, it would be treated, politically, as an national economic crisis. Our 4,600 airplanes are manufacturing plants; they manufacture available seat miles. Why is their increasing idleness not a national economic crisis?
While airports are physically "local" in nature, the lack of adequate runway capacity is an increasingly severe constraint upon interstate and international commerce, adversely affecting all of the U.S. and all of its people.
Under our Constitution, and most particularly its interstate commerce clause, our federal government has a vast reservoir of unexercised powers that could be invoked to resolve the runway capacity crisis. Here are some possibilities:
- Shorten the runway environmental review process by providing that all environmental reviews (local, state. and federal) proceed concurrently (instead of consecutively) and be completed within two years (instead of 10 or 12).
- Provide that any "congested" airport (as defined) must increase its usable runway capacity within a stipulated period, upon penalty of losing all or some of its right to assess passenger facility charges and to receive Airport Improvement Program entitlements and grants, if it fails to do so.
- Limit use of severely congested airports at which natural impediments block expansions to runway capacity, to aircraft of a certain size, weight or carrying capacity during the most congested periods of their day.
- Ordain by federal statute that airports of great significance to interstate commerce must construct additional runway capacity.
- If all else fails, "federalize" the airport system (although each airport is locally owned, all of them together constitute an interstate "airport system").
Many of the foregoing "possibilities" are extremely controversial. I don't necessarily recommend them all. But I do set them forth to stimulate thought about the range and types of approaches that might be explored in order to transmute the listless inaction of the last 22 years into the dynamic runway expansion and improvement program of the next 22 years.
In effect, we need an "interstate runway program" equivalent in energy and effectiveness to the interstate highway program that began in the 1950s. To reprise the old Nike slogan, let's "just do it."
Herbert D. Kelleher, one of the founders of Southwest Airlines, steps down this month as president and CEO, but will remain chairman of the 30-year-old, Dallas-based carrier.
New Jersey Aviation Association
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Phone: 973 734 9994 - Fax: 973 734 9995
