Overall capacity at LGA won't really change - the runway configuration is the primary check on capacity at LGA, and the current plan won't change that side of things. It's not like the four airports are completely independent either; all four are managed by PANYNJ and in the N90 TRACON, so there's a coordinated approach. In the short-term, congestion at all three airports may actually decrease; some gates will have to be taken out of service during construction, so there will probably be fewer flights into/out of LGA while work is ongoing.

(Written on 29.07.2015)(Permalink)

John Mica is the worst. I used to work at a pro-passenger rail advocacy group and I remember how, in the space of basically a year he went from being a reasonable advocate for a balanced transportation system to basically a pro-highway, anti-everything else nut in the space of under a year. This all happened pretty much right after he took over chairmanship of the committee from Jim Oberstar. When Bill Shuster took over the chairman spot for the house transportation committee back in 2013, he spent several months basically having to tell Mica to shut up so that the Committee could actually get things done instead of spending (almost literally) all of its time on Amtrak-bashing, in between his nearly incessant demands for a whole mess of federal funding for SunRail (which runs through his district), so basically he ended up getting called out over and over again for cynically using Amtrak as a whipping boy to show off his conservative credentials despite actually wanting rail transi

(Written on 24.07.2015)(Permalink)

Let's answer your questions: "First off, what did this new scathing report cost us and in what direction will it send the next billion dollar shotgun blast of fixer upper?" The report was conducted by the National Academies, (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=49524 for the project overview page). The report was a stipulation of Section 212 of the FAA Modernization Act of 2012. The report gives a number of different recommendations, though the key recommendation is that the FAA needs to better outline the details of the NextGen process to key stakeholders so that program goals can better align with operational realities. Now, in terms of your argument that we "poured billions into the Aviation Trust Fund with our fuel taxes and other aviation user fees just for this purpose down the road." Your comments belie a fundamental ignorance about how the FAA operates. The money from the Aviation Trust Fund goes to maintaining the National Airspace System (staf

(Written on 05.05.2015)(Permalink)

I know, right? The worst part is that the NRC probably did months of interviews, hundreds, if not thousands of man-hours of data gathering (and analysis), had to learn how ATC systems work, and just a whole bunch of other stuff, all for it to be reduced down to sound bytes. It's not even the lazy journalists or the dumb politicians, it's the sheer level to which they reduce thousands of hours of work down to two sentence blurbs that reinforce what they want to hear. The shame isn't in the idiocy and laziness, it's that the researchers and academics try so hard anyways. It's painful to watch.

(Written on 05.05.2015)(Permalink)

At what, exactly?

(Written on 05.05.2015)(Permalink)

Clearly, nobody at WaPo or at the GOP has actually read the report. Let's clear the air on this. Starting from the top of the report, it's very clear that the WaPo editing staff is being lazy here. Even the specific quotes they use are cherry picked to all hell. First of all, the report is not even close to what one could remotely call "scathing." Rather, it argues that NextGen has mostly become a modernization program. The NRC Committee sees this as highly valuable, but that "With so many stakeholders and so many moving parts, different understandings of 'what is NextGen' arose. As the committee has come to understand it, NextGen today is a set of programs to implement a suite of incremental changes to the NAS. Although some technologies and/or systems will be new, in most cases, current plans call for them to be used to closely replicate existing capabilities (such as satellite navigation used to replace radar functionality rather than the reinvention of flight)." (National Res

(Written on 04.05.2015)(Permalink)

Yes, but the media doesn't really understand how these things work. We also have a bunch of situations where the news mistakenly do the opposite and report things that occur on regional airlines as if they were on mainline flights. In other words, it works both ways.

(Written on 14.04.2015)(Permalink)

One question I have is whether such a system would still be capable of preventing these kinds of intentional CFIT incidents. For example, a pilot, aware of the particular system logic of the system, might be able to make the system "think" he's making a landing, but then at the last second drop the nose or something. Such a system would also probably not stop a pilot from basically putting the plane into an intentional spin or stall. Basically, if a pilot wants to intentionally crash a plane, it seems like these kinds of systems would not really be that much of a barrier.

(Written on 31.03.2015)(Permalink)

Isn't mandatory retirement only a thing for pilots? Does Boeing have some policy on this?

(Written on 18.02.2015)(Permalink)

Ending the 757 production lines made short-term sense in 2005. It did not make long-term sense when looking at where the airline market would be in 10 years, but it did make sense based on where it was in 2005. Boeing had poor leadership at the time. Strong-willed and visionary leadership (or the lack thereof) has impacts; consider that when Boeing closed down the 757 lines in 2005, they had 4 CEOs in under 3 years (Condit resigned in 2003, was succeeded by Stonecipher, who resigned in 2005 and was replaced first by James Bell as acting CEO and then later in 2005 by Jim McNerney). It's hard to have a company think about what the market will look like in 10 years if the leadership can't even think beyond the next 10 months. I'm in grad school to be a city planner; I'm going to be working for the government, so I do obviously have some level of bias there, but I will say that this isn't about government vs. private sector, this is about good leadership vs. poor leadership. The g

(Written on 18.02.2015)(Permalink)