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Traffic at the New York area’s busiest airport, Kennedy International, has jumped about 25 percent in the last year, aviation officials say. The increase raises concerns about serious flight delays as summer approaches and is pushing the Federal Aviation Administration to consider major changes in runway operations.
The F.A.A. has begun using three of Kennedy’s four runways simultaneously for much of the day, a procedure once reserved for brief periods of peak traffic, and a spokeswoman said yesterday that it was considering a plan to use all four at once. Air traffic controllers say that using three runways at once raises safety risks, and that using four would be courting disaster.
While Kennedy was built to handle international flights, growth in the last year has been driven largely by domestic flights added by Delta, JetBlue and others, according to officials at the F.A.A. and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Arrivals and departures are running about 1,300 a day, up from about 1,050 last year, and they are expected to reach 1,350 by this summer, the peak travel season.
Peter Cerda, the director of safety operations and infrastructure for the Americas at the International Air Transport Association, an airline industry group, said it was important to make maximum use of runways because otherwise, extensive delays might develop.
Kennedy has two pairs of parallel runways, and the preferred procedure is to use one pair at a time, whichever allows takeoffs and landings into the wind. But to keep traffic flowing, air traffic controllers have frequently resorted to using three at a time, a practice previously limited to brief periods.
That works as long as crosswinds are not too strong. (And because the runways are at right angles, a headwind on one pair will be a crosswind on the other.)
Barrett Byrnes, president of the Kennedy Airport chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said the airport had lately been clearing planes to operate on runways with crosswinds heavier than were previously allowed.
On May 5, the union filed a complaint with the F.A.A., saying it had violated its own rules on crosswind limits. But David J. Paguaga, the operations manager for the F.A.A. at Kennedy, said procedures had not changed and the airport continued to operate within its rules.
While the distance between Kennedy and La Guardia or Newark Liberty can seem endless on the street, in aeronautical terms the three airports resemble three fat passengers in a row of airline seats: one vigorous swing of an elbow and there may be trouble. Planes taking off to the northeast at Kennedy, for example, cannot turn too sharply to the north or they will violate La Guardia’s airspace.
In addition, with simultaneous operations on perpendicular runways, even those that do not intersect, the possibilities for collisions increase, Mr. Byrnes said. For example, if a plane is cleared to land on a runway that ends a few feet before the middle of a perpendicular runway, but the pilot decides to abort the landing and circle back around, the plane cleared to land will cross the other runway at a low altitude. “You basically have airplanes flying at each other,” Mr. Byrnes said.
Mr. Paguaga said operations on perpendicular runways were managed safely.
According to the Port Authority, which runs all three New York area airports, for the 12 months ended Feb. 28, there were 6.5 million passengers at Kennedy, up 11.7 percent over the previous year, and 66,600 flights, up 26 percent. When the number of flights grows faster than the number of people on them, the traffic growth is generally in smaller planes. In the same period, La Guardia showed small decreases in flights and passengers. Newark showed small increases in both.
Meanwhile, ridership on the AirTrain, which runs from Jamaica, Queens, to the terminals at Kennedy, is booming; April is usually a slow month at the airport, but the daily passenger traffic on the train between the Howard Beach and Jamaica stations and the terminals was 11,700, the Port Authority said. In comparison, last August, the peak month, daily AirTrain passenger traffic was 11,500.
The rebuilding of taxiways at Kennedy, some old and others inadequate for very large planes, is adding to the congestion, aviation officials said. The superjumbo Airbus A380, which can carry more than 850 passengers and touched down at Kennedy in March, needs wider taxiways, and the Boeing 777-300 series and the Airbus A340-600 series need stronger pavement, officials said.
The traffic increase coincides with heightened friction between managers and air traffic controllers at Kennedy over staffing levels. Mr. Byrnes said the number of controllers had fallen to about 30 from about 38 a year ago, when there were fewer flights. But Mr. Paguaga said the control tower has been overstaffed for years.
The controller work force nationally is facing a wave of retirements, because many were hired in the early 1980s to replace those fired en masse during the strike of 1981. The F.A.A. plans to meet its needs by hiring “developmental” controllers, who arrive with college training in their craft, and putting them through extensive computer simulations to cut down on the on-the-job training needed to turn them into journeymen controllers.
Mr. Paguaga said: “We do have a pipeline of people that are developmentals coming into the building. We’re in good shape.”
