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LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

October 5, 1999, Tuesday, Final Edition

SECTION: Business; Pg. 6E

LENGTH: 555 words

HEADLINE: New bill would reform airline traffic control;
Transportation secretary urges Senate approval of $ 45 million in FAA plans.

BYLINE: Jim Abrams, Staff

SOURCE: JOURNAL

BODY:
Warning of gridlock at the nation's airports, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater urged Congress on Monday to pass a Federal Aviation Administration bill with major changes in how air traffic control systems are run.

Widespread flight delays around the country this summer made clear that "if we don't act that's exactly what we are going to have --- gridlock," Slater said in an interview. "We could see this system come to a chokepoint." The Senate on Monday took up a bill that would authorize some $ 45 billion in FAA programs over four years. The Senate bill, like a five-year, $ 59 billion bill passed by the House in June, concentrates on safety, modernization and competition issues over the next decade when passenger loads on American airlines are expected to increase 50 percent to 1 billion a year.

Slater said 95 percent of the administration's reform elements are addressed by either the House or Senate bills but "we're not at a point now where we have a bill the president could sign."

He said an amendment to the Senate bill that would create an air traffic control oversight committee and a chief operating officer was a good start toward operating the system more like a business. The amendment is being offered by Sens. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), and John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

Other ideas the administration wants to consider as the bill advances through Congress include replacing the current excise tax on passengers with cost-based prices on commercial users --- the airlines, he said.

A similar FAA bill passed the Senate by a 92-1 vote last year but the Senate and House were never able to settle differences in their two versions. The main point of contention was the increase in flights at some of the nation's busiest airports.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) has pushed hard for lifting the ceilings on flights out of Chicago's O'Hare, New York's LaGuardia and Kennedy and Washington's Reagan National airports. He has argued that this is one way to increase competition and improve service to smaller communities that have suffered under airline dereg- ulation.

Another Gorton-Rockefeller amendment would eliminate slot rules at O'Hare in 2003 and at the New York airports in 2007, with new slots --- a takeoff or landing --- going to new entrants or services to smaller communities.

Washington would get 24 new slots, 12 for service outside a 1,250-mile " perimeter rule" established in 1986 to protect Dulles and Baltimore-Wash- ington, the region's two long-haul airports.

Lawmakers from the three areas strongly oppose the lifting or raising of flight ceilings, saying it would lead to more noise pollution and pose safety risks. Allowing more flights would wrongly imply "that it is safe to have more flights into the most congested airport in the world," Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., said of flights at O'Hare.

A final compromise on the legislation has also been slowed by provisions in the House bill, championed by House Transportation Committee Chairman Bud Shuster (R-Pa.) that would bar Congress from using funds from the Aviation Trust Fund for purposes other than aviation.

The trust fund, which takes in about $ 10 billion a year in airport user taxes, is now used for general budget programs as well as airport projects.

LOAD-DATE: October 6, 1999