WASHINGTON - Marion Blakey, outgoing administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, was leaving the agency Thursday with a candidly negative outlook on the industry she has been regulating.
"While it is the safest form of transportation," Blakey told BusinessWeek, "deep in your heart you still know that [when you're] flying at 30,000 feet with no safety net you're counting on the system - a system that is at the breaking point."
As the industry and its customers continue to struggle through record numbers of flight delays and other service and safety issues, Blakey said this week airlines need to cut back their schedules or face government action.
"The airlines need to take a step back on scheduling practices that are at times out of line with reality," Blakey said in remarks prepared for a luncheon this week.
Blakey said the agency is particularly concerned about overcrowded skies and airports along the East Coast, saying "if the airlines don't address this voluntarily, don't be surprised when the government steps in."
Blakey finished a five-year stint at the agency Thursday to take a jobwith the Aerospace Industries Association. One of the association's top lobbying priorities was increasing appropriations for the FAA, Blakey's agency and that has caused an outcry among public travel advocates about where Blakey's priorities have been since she began negotiating terms of her new job.
The airline industry's on-time performance in the first seven months of 2007 was its worst since comparable data began being collected in 1995, according to the government.
U.S. carriers reported an on-time arrival rate of 69.8 percent in July, the most recent statistics available, down from 73.7 percent a year ago, according to the Department of Transportation.
There have been 339 incidents so far this year where planes got too close to each other or to objects on the ground, up from 297 in the same period last year, MSNBC reported.
Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant based in Evergreen, Colo., criticized Blakey and the FAA for not doing more to upgrade air traffic control systems, which he said are 10 years out of date.
"The skies are not crowded; the skies are mismanaged by the FAA," he said.
In her remarks this week, Blakey talked about a recent $1.8 billion contract award to ITT Corp. to build the first portion of a new satellite-based air traffic control system. But that upgrade is already almost seven years behind schedule, Boyd said.
Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the government has acted in the past to reduce congestion. She noted that the FAA stepped in several years ago in Chicago and held "scheduling meetings" that led to reduced flights during peak hours at Chicago's O'Hare airport.
Bob Mann, an airline analyst and consultant, said a similar exercise should be done nationwide, though it would be much more complex.
David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, an industry group, said any effort to reduce crowding in the Northeast should involve international airlines and corporate jets, as well as U.S. airlines.
Castelveter said the airlines' schedules are intended to meet the demands of customers.
"The carriers put airplanes where people want to go, and when they want to fly," he said. "They're not flying empty airplanes."
Mann, however, argued that consumers might prefer fewer flights on larger planes that would have fewer delays.
