Congress poised to end furloughs, flight delays

Bart Jansen and Susan Davis, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Congress is poised to end air-traffic-control furloughs that have delayed thousands of flights this week.

The Senate unanimously agreed Thursday to allow the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to shift $253 million from other accounts so it can end furloughs and keep towers open at smaller airports nationwide. The House is expected to rubber-stamp the legislation Friday.

Lawmakers said the furloughs could end immediately under the bill, but the FAA said it wasn't clear how quickly the controller schedules could be changed.

"This should prevent the onerous delays that have been occurring and that were only going to get worse as the traveling season reached its peak this summer," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who serves on the appropriations subcommittee for transportation.

In the face of flier, pilot and airline CEO frustration, senators had sought to shift in funding in the FAA to end the furloughs that had stacked up flights from New York to Los Angeles for a fifth straight day.

"This is one of the worst flying experiences ever," said Evan Shenkin, a New York resident who changed Delta flights twice Wednesday and whose departure was delayed four hours to fly from Boston Logan to JFK airport in New York.

About 40% of delays this week were a result of not enough controllers in towers, the FAA said, with 400 delays blamed on staffing Sunday, 1,200 delays blamed on staffing on Monday, 1,025 on Tuesday and 863 on Wednesday.

The total number of delays, including those for weather, more than tripled from a year earlier, from 2,795 to 8,804 this week, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union representing furloughed workers.

On Thursday, the FAA warned of delays from staffing shortages at the three New York-area airports and regional centers for Southern California, Chicago and Washington.

Nobody liked the furloughs of about 1,500 controllers a day, which resulted from governmentwide spending cuts that forced the FAA needing to cut $637 million by Sept. 30.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said they couldn't avoid furloughs to shave about $220 million and the closure of towers at small airports to save $25 million, along with curbing training, travel and information-technology spending.

The White House signaled Wednesday it was prepared to fix just the FAA, which spokesman Jay Carney called it a "Band-Aid approach" to the lingering federal spending dispute between Republican lawmakers and the Democratic administration.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said the legislation would allow FAA to keep open the towers, "in a victory for air travelers and communities nationwide."

The bill doesn't specify how FAA should spend the $253 million. The chairman of the Senate transportation committee, Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the bill provides crucial funding to end furloughs and flight delays, but does not fix all of FAA's problems, such as closing contract towers.

The FAA planned to close 149 towers staffed by contract workers on June 15, although local communities offered to pay to keep about 50 open. The towers are at airports with less than 150,000 landings and departures a year and 10,000 commercial landings and departures.

Spencer Dickerson, executive director of the U.S. Contract Tower Association, said there is clearly money to keep the towers open, so his group will lobby for tower funding under the legislation.

"We're going to work with the FAA to work on a solution here that will keep these towers open, so they will provide the safety benefits that control towers provide the traveling public," Dickerson said.

Contributing: Nancy Trejos