FAA delays closure of air-traffic control towers

Thomas Frank, USA TODAY | USATODAY

The Federal Aviation Administration said today it would delay the closing of 149 air-traffic control towers until June 15 so it can try to resolve legal challenges brought by more than a dozen airports.

The surprise announcement came one day after the city of Ormond Beach, Fla., asked a federal court to issue an emergency ruling stopping its tower from being closed on April 14. The city said in legal papers that the closure would jeopardize safety at its airport, which handles as many as 630 airplanes in a day and has no scheduled passenger service.

Ormond Beach and other communities say in lawsuits that the FAA failed to conduct a required safety analysis to determine the effect of closing airport towers.

The FAA was planning to close towers at 24 small airports on Sunday. Another 46 were to close on April 24, and the final 79 would have closed on May 5. All of the airports would remain open but without the controllers who keep airplanes a safe distance apart and notify arriving pilots of runway hazards, such as wildlife or ice.

The delay will provide time both to resolve legal challenges and for dozens of communities to work out potential plans to take over funding of the towers. It also allows time for Congress to consider providing money to keep the towers open over the long term.

The towers were being closed to help the FAA meet budget-cutting requirements faced by nearly every federal agency under a process called sequestration. The FAA must cut $637 million in spending by Sept. 30. Closing the towers was to save $33 million. It is not clear how the delay will affect the FAA's budget. The FAA has said that closing the towers is one of its few budget-cutting options.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who has led efforts to restore funding for the towers, said in a statement today that the FAA's delay was welcome but "is not a solution." Moran said he and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., will introduce a measure next week to prevent any of the nation's roughly 530 airport control towers from closing.

Earlier this week, Moran told USA TODAY that enacting his bill in the immediate future would be difficult. "Congress is so slow," Moran said. "The best solution is for the administration to reverse its position and conclude administratively to fund the towers."

The 149 towers are located mostly at small airports that cater to private airplanes and have limited commercial service. Only about three dozen airports have scheduled passenger flights, which are usually a few trips a day to a nearby hub. Those airports handled about 3 million passengers in 2011, FAA records show.

On Thursday night, USA TODAY reported that 30 people a year have been killed in airplane collisions since 1982, according to the newspaper's analysis of federal records. Nearly half of the collisions occurred near airports that do not have a control tower.

The newspaper also disclosed that the FAA projected in a 1990 paper that midair collisions between airplanes are three times more likely at airports without a tower as at airports with a tower, and that runway collisions are six times more likely at airports without towers. The FAA used the paper as recently as 2005 to determine which airports need control towers.

Transportation Department spokeswoman Sasha Johnson said the FAA paper is no longer used to assess risk and does not reflect safety improvements in the past 25 years.

MORE: Fear of flying rises with flight tower closures on radar

Roughly 50 communities facing tower closure have expressed interest in keeping the towers open using local funds, the FAA said. On Thursday, for example, the Texas Department of Transportation said it would spend $2 million to keep 14 local airports open for 90 days beyond their scheduled closure.

At the Naples Municipal Airport in South Florida, airport Executive Director Ted Soliday said the delay announced by the FAA will give him additional time to find funding to keep the local tower open. But it will be costly — between $600,000 and $800,000 a year — and the process of hiring controllers will be lengthy and complicated because of Florida's government-procurement laws.

"June 15 is a good break, but we still have to go through the selection process and the bidding process," Soliday said Friday. "I'm not sure the federal government understands that." The Naples tower was to close on May 5.

Peter Kirsch, a Denver lawyer representing nine airports that were to lose their towers, told USA TODAY Friday morning that a court ruling would come on April 12 at the earliest. Lawsuits by numerous airports have been consolidated and are being handled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in California.

The Ormond Beach lawsuit includes a paper by a consortium of local flight schools saying that a catastrophic event would be likely if the FAA closes towers at Ormond Beach and at the nearby New Smyrna Beach, Fla., airport, on Florida's eastern coast. With the towers, a catastrophic event is "improbable," according to the Central Florida Flight Training Group.

Closing both towers "would significantly impact safety for all those" flying in the region, the group said.

"This has been a complex process and we need to get this right," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement Friday announcing the delay. "Safety is our top priority. We will use this additional time to make sure communities and pilots understand the changes at their local airports."