Adam Greco Educates the Flying Public about Delays
By Pete Castellano
It’s no secret that the summer of 2007 was the worst in terms of airport delays since the year 1995. In June alone, there were 492 incidents where aircraft were stranded on the runways and taxiways for 3 or more hours confining passengers with no way to exit the plane. In an attempt to educate the flying public on delays and the initiatives the FAA is taking to mitigate those delays, the Office of the ATO Vice President for Communications created a traveling exhibit that toured several major airports this summer. In addition to the computerized kiosk with specific airport delay information for major airports and informative posters and looped recording of pilots and controllers, the exhibit featured a fully functioning Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) display. The Web System Display (WSD) is a large monitor with the continental United States as a backdrop and shows thousands of actual aircraft targets in real time as well as displaying any significant weather.
Adam Greco of the Technology Integration Team managed the exhibit at Newark, Chicago O’Hare, and Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airports for three weeks during the summer. Adam’s purpose was to explain to the flying public what constitutes a delay, to explain why certain delays occur in the system, and to educate the interested flyers on what the agency is doing to mitigate those delays. Adam talked to hundreds of people at the three locations and he was very impressed with the reception that people gave once they actually saw the reason for their delay on the ETMS display. Seventy percent of all delays are caused by weather, but many times a passenger is not told why their individual flight has been delayed. Once the passenger could actually look at the ETMS display and see that major delays were caused by thunderstorm activity over the New York metropolitan area, they better understood how the system gets adversely affected.
Though the summer delays were staggering in terms of delays, cancelled flights, and consumer outrage, the month of September proved to be a welcome turnaround for the industry. The nation’s 20 largest carriers reported an on time arrival rate of 81% in September, up from 76% in the same month last year, and up from 71% in August, according statistics supplied from the DOT. Since the New York Metropolitan area accounts for half the delays in the country, the FAA held a 2-day summit to address the problems at JFK International Airport. The latest government proposal is to reduce JFK’s hourly flight limit by 20%.
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