November 30 in Washington, attracted some 150 industry participants, including representatives from Airports Council International-North America, the American Association of Airport Executives, and the National Air Transportation Association.
The Diversion Forum came about following a late October snowstorm that pummeled the Northeast and saw an inordinate amount of airline diversions sent to Hartford’s Bradley International Airport (BDL), where passengers were left sitting on the airfield for as long as seven hours.
Not surprisingly, communication appears to be at the center of the issue. I spoke with ACI-NA vice president Deborah McElroy this week about the meeting and she relates that an association survey shows that some 84 percent of U.S. airports have contingency plans in place for handling airliner diversions. She emphasizes that airports are standing by to help alleviate similar situations in the future, but they need to have better communications from the air carriers. In the Hartford situation, McElroy says that airlines were “independently making decisions on where to divert” without coordination with airports.
“The airport was sort of set up to fail,” she says. “At some point the airport said it was not sure it could take any more airplanes. Air traffic control told them there were fuel emergencies, so they took the airplanes.”
And she adds, “We really need to understand the resource limitations of airports.”
McElroy says that in all the time she has been at ACI-NA she has never seen the airport community respond so quickly to an issue. The point is that airports understand they play a significant role when irregular operations occur; they’d just like to be brought in on the decision-making process.
In a follow-up letter to DOT/FAA from ACI-NA and AAAE, airports made their recommendations on how this can occur. A couple of excerpts …
“Effective management of significant diversion events like that on October 29 requires more effective regional coordination among FAA, airlines, and airports -- not simply new plans. The airlines and FAA need tools that can enable them to make more informed decisions about where to divert aircraft, notably real-time information about which flights have been diverted to which airports. Such information can prevent any individual airport from being overloaded with diversions, as was the case at BDL.
“The FAA needs to do a better job of communicating equipment outages to airlines and airports. Other government agencies -- particularly CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] -- need to be more responsive and flexible during diversion events, especially extreme events like that of October 29, so that international passengers can be offloaded expeditiously, including to ad hoc sterile areas if diverted international passenger volumes exceed the CBP processing capabilities of the diversion airport.”
The good news is that during an extreme event the airlines and FAA/air traffic control got everyone on the ground safely without incident. The bad news is we haven’t yet figured out how to get those passengers off the airlines once safely on the ground. Hopefully the Diversion Forum is Step One toward that goal.
Thanks for reading … jfi
