Revitalizing air traffic control would boost small airports

America’s small towns are in trouble. Despite 85 consecutive months of job growth and predictions by economists that the country is nearing full employment, Main Streets across America are struggling.

Revitalizing these communities — historically our nation’s cultural and commercial backbone — is a political and economic imperative that ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. How to address these problems and what policy prescriptions to apply at the local, state and federal level has been hotly debated by politicians of all stripes for decades. All the while, the problem has gotten progressively worse.

What we know for certain is that before we can reverse the damage done, we need to staunch the bleeding. For thousands of these communities, small regional airports serve as a critical lifeline connecting people and markets. When an airport shuts down or a commercial route is canceled, the result is often crippling. Preserving commercial air service for small communities is a necessity, but an often-overlooked aspect of the debate now raging in Washington is over our nation’s air-traffic control system. President Donald Trump and many in Congress are now backing an overhaul of the control system in order to separate operations from the safety regulators of the Federal Aviation Administration. This effort will maintain access and services to small market airports and rural communities. Additionally, funding and management of the control system for rural communities would be more reliable and consistent once removed from the politicized appropriations process and Washington bureaucracy.

Like so much of our nation’s critical infrastructure, America’s air-traffic control system is woefully antiquated. In an age when almost every consumer electronic device on the market — from phones to watches — is embedded with space-based radio navigation (GPS), the system that guides every airplane from takeoff to landing still relies on World War II-era radar towers. While many have focused on the cost to big-city travelers in the form of delays and longer flight routes, small communities are forced to bear the brunt of the issue. Many non-hub airports like John Glenn Columbus International Airport are reduced mostly to short, connecting flights on smaller regional jets.

There is nothing that illustrates this better than what the industry refers to as “block time.” Block time is simply the total amount of time a flight takes — from pushing back from the departure gate to arriving at the destination gate. Since 2006, airlines have had to increase their average scheduled block times to fly between the same points A and B by 33 million minutes. While some of that increase is driven by the airlines’ desire to maintain a high on-time rating, the underlying reason is overwhelmingly due to the inefficiency of the airtraffic control system.

Playing the hypothetical, let’s suppose that U.S. carriers could once again save those 33 million minutes. Those 33 million minutes saved are the equivalent of nearly 1,000 pilots. That’s 1,000 pilots who could be used to add capacity back into the system; one estimate suggests this would result in two more departures per day from small communities. That’s a pretty big win for small communities that have lost nearly four departures per day since 2006. In the case of Columbus, based on current available data, landings at the airport have declined consistently since April 2008.

Today, small-community air service in the U.S. directly creates 1.1 million jobs and $37 billion in wages, ultimately generating $121 billion in economic activity each year. In Columbus, the airport and aviation industry support 54,000 jobs, $1.8 billion in payroll, and $6.6 billion in total economic output. Now, after decades of inaction, Congress has an opportunity and the mandate to fix what is broken with our air-traffic control system. Failure to act will not only burden future generations with needless delays and lost productivity, it will condemn our nation’s smallest airports and the communities they support.

To its credit, the Trump administration has endorsed taking this on and has advanced a proposal to permanently fix the problem. Congress should get on board.