FAA command center works to keep flights on time

WARRENTON, Va. -- Past rolling hills and grazing horses in this quiet corner of Virginia sits an ultramodern command center that's a pulsating mix of NASA Mission Control, the Counter Terrorist Unit set on the TV show "24" and a stock market trading floor.

Here at the Air Traffic Control System Command Center, run by the Federal Aviation Administration, workers labor every day to keep America's harried summertime air travelers on schedule. Dozens of staffers oversee the nation's airspace to try to minimize those nettlesome travel delays.

Every weekday, about 2 million people in the United States take to the nation's skies on commercial flights: businessmen looking to seal a deal, families going on long-awaited vacations and fun-seekers jetting off for hedonistic weekends. One objective unites them all: They want to get to their destinations on time. But often that doesn't happen.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics, part of the Department of Transportation, said the nation's 16 largest air carriers reported an on-time arrival rate of 76.9 percent for June, the most recent month for which statistics were available, meaning that nearly a quarter of flights suffer delays.

According to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that analyzed 2007 data and was released in October, delays cost travelers $16.7 billion in lost time and inefficiency -- airlines lost $8.3 billion -- and took $4 billion off the gross domestic product.

Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant, said air traffic delays hadn't improved significantly over the past decade despite huge federal investment. He blamed years of what he called bad management at the FAA for continuing congestion and delays, problems that the agency hopes to solve with a new satellite-based air traffic control system, called NextGen, that's slowly being rolled out.

But Boyd had only praise for the staffers in Warrenton.

"The people at the command center are the ones keeping us safe," Boyd said. "They're keeping airplanes across the sky safe. Those are the people who are real heroes."

Inside an obscure, 3-month-old federal building about an hour's drive from Washington sit banks of flat-screen computers where the center's staff -- about 40 people on the eight-hour daytime shift -- look for and try to fix potential air travel trouble spots.

The center helps order ground-stop and delay programs to reduce traffic flow to weather-affected airports, warns airlines to reroute planes in advance of weather or other problems and stays in close contact with air traffic control centers across the United States to find and resolve other aviation system issues.

Six huge TV screens hang from the wall at the front of the room, displaying weather radar maps, airport configurations, the center's daily schedule, airports that are experiencing delays and news channels.

"Whether it's an equipment outage or a weather issue, we keep the system moving as safely and efficiently as possible," said Mark Libby, the air traffic manager of the center.

The center played a key role in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the FAA ordered a first-ever halt to all U.S. commercial air travel. National traffic management officer Michael Murphy, a 10-year veteran of the center and a former controller, was on duty that day.

He watched on his computer screens as thousands of planes quickly landed at the closest available airports.

"It was staggering to watch how fast the system landed 5,000 airplanes," he recalled. "It was within two hours that everybody was on the ground."

To help address the problem of persistent delays, the FAA is trying to get NextGen off the ground, moving from ground-based radar to satellite-based tracking of planes -- a much more advanced version of the GPS systems now present in most vehicles.