Plan offered to ease flight delays
WASHINGTON - US airlines would be required to buy some takeoff and landing slots at New York's Kennedy airport and Newark's Liberty airport under a government plan to ease delays in some of the nation's busiest airspace.
Carriers also would have to disclose new baggage fees, report long strandings of passengers on runways, and work with the Federal Aviation Administration to avoid mass groundings of planes, US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement yesterday.
Her plans for slot auctions, which may face legal challenges and are opposed by airlines and New York officials, are an attempt to use market-based measures to cut delays. Last month Peters proposed auctions for New York's LaGuardia. Her plans for Kennedy and Newark are similar.
The New York area's three major airports were the most congested in the United States last year, with 58 percent of flights arriving on time at LaGuardia, 59 percent at Liberty, and 63 percent at Kennedy. New York delays ripple across the country, exacerbating air congestion nationwide.
"These ill-conceived and unlawful proposals are driven by ideology and will not reduce congestion," said James May, president of the Air Transport Association, the Washington-based trade group for major US carriers.
Peters also ordered Newark flights capped from June 1 until October 2009 to ensure delays don't increase, meaning that all three New York airports will have limits. She also will help fund a study of possible transit connections to New York's Stewart Airport, located 90 miles north of Manhattan, to help relieve air congestion in the area.
The International Air Transport Association considers the auctions "unproven economics experiments," said Steve Lott, the Montreal-based group's spokesman.
