Congress is responsible for reauthorizing the FAA every few years. That reauthorization sets funding levels for a variety of projects and it sets priorities. So, when Congress can’t stop jerking around, the FAA sits and spins, waiting to do the work it needs to do until Congress lets it.

There have been a variety of hold-ups over the years, but a compromise has finally been reached. Yesterday, the Senate approved the bill that the House had already passed. You can read the entire mind-numbing 374-page bill on your own, but I thought I’d go over some highlights.

NextGen is Coming (Title II)
The biggest victory for absolutely everyone is a solid plan to finally implement “NextGen” air traffic control. There was even some acceleration of the program here. Without getting into details, NextGen will eventually replace the existing air traffic control system with something more modern. It will ultimately allow for more direct routings, fewer delays, and greater levels of safety.

On a related note, the redesign of the airspace surrounding New York City and Philly will also push through thanks to this bill. That means more efficient routings and fewer delays in the most delay-prone region in the US.

Minor Cuts to Essential Air Service (Title IV, Subtitle B, Section 421)
For those who have been closely following the Essential Air Service (EAS) program, there were some cuts there, but as usual, the cuts ended up being pretty minor and irrelevant to most. The new rule is that if an airport in the lower 48 states receiving EAS funding boards fewer than 10 people per day, it will lose funding UNLESS there is no other medium or large hub (defined by the FAA as having at least 0.25% of boardings in the US) within 175 miles.

Of the 109 airports in the Continental US that received EAS funding in 2010, 36 board fewer than 10 people each day. Pretty big chunk, right? Not so much. Only 9 of those are less than 175 miles from a medium or large hub airport, so the impact is minor. (Cities on the chopping block are Jonesboro, AR; Kingman, AZ; Merced, CA; Athens and Macon, GA; Hagerstown, MD; Bradford and Oil City/Franklin, PA; and Jackson, TN.)

More Perimeter Exemptions at Washington/National (Title IV, Subtitle A, Section 414)
One change that will appeal to DC travelers is the expansion of the perimeter rule exemption. As you might know, flying from Washington/National is limited to airports within 1,250 miles except for a handful of slot exemptions that can go further. This reauthorization will add 8 more roundtrip slots that can go beyond the perimeter.

Half of those must go to new entrants or “limited” incumbents who have very little service already. I assume we’ll see Alaska, JetBlue, Frontier, Southwest, and Spirit vie for those. For the other four roundtrips, the big guys can get the slots, but they can only get 1 roundtrip each and they have to convert an existing in-perimeter slot to use it. I’m quite interested to see how that might work. Maybe United wants to fly to San Francisco, but other than that, I imagine the airlines mostly want to use the slots to go to cities they already serve with existing perimeter exemptions.

Beyond the above changes, the airlines have to be really happy with this bill. They had several victories:

• No increase in the $4.50 cap on Passenger Facility Charge (PFC) that airports can levy. Airports were looking for an increase to $7.50. Airport improvement funds also stay flat despite an effort by airports to see that increased.
• No rules requiring inspections of foreign repair stations were mandated. Some groups were hoping to require inspection for safety reasons. The legality of that was questionable, and it would also likely reduce the attractiveness of outsourcing.
• No restrictions on joint ventures or alliances. Some were pushing for expiration of immunity with periodic reviews required to maintain it.
• The 3 hour tarmac delay rule was not put into law but will just remain a DOT regulation (which is easier to get changed). It is, however, now required that emergency contingency plans are filed for dealing with these types of problems, however. That’s a good thing.
• In a nod to the fight over unionization, this bill requires unions to get 50 percent of potential members to sign a card for election, up from 35 percent. This is at best a very minor victory for airlines, but I honestly don’t think it matters much at all.

Beyond that, there are a bunch of odds and ends in the bill. Things like banning pilots from using personal wireless devices in the cockpit and regulating the carriage of musical instruments show just how deep into the weeds this can get.

As usual, the bill also puts out requirements to study a lot of different things. No action required, but just studying. This includes a study on alternate ways to charge for PFCs outside the ticket price, a study of air quality in aircraft cabins (long overdue, if you ask many flight attendants), a study of the tarmac delay rule, a study of cell phone use on airplanes, and a study looking to increase intermodal travel. I imagine most of these studies will lead absolutely nowhere.

In the end, this is long overdue, and it will help get a lot of important work moving, in particular that relating to NextGen air traffic control.

Airline Fee Changes Require Full Disclosure – NBC Los Angeles
I met up with the folks at NBC4 here in LA to walk them through some of the changes from this week’s DOT rule change. Here’s the video:

View more videos at: http://nbclosangeles.com.

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Tired of waiting behind the unwashed masses which never seem to be able to separate themselves from their bottled water, belts, liquids and shoes at security checkpoints? If you’ve put off submitting an application for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) trusted traveler program, you now have another reason to stop procrastinating.

The TSA has opened expedited screening lanes at several major airports around the country. The “PreCheck” program started with a limited trial at selected locations last October at DFW, Atlanta, Miami, and Detroit. Originally open only to top-tier American and Delta Air Lines passengers who were already members of one of the CBP’s Trusted Traveler Programs, PreCheck has now been expanded to include any passenger who holds Global Entry, SENTRI, or NEXUS approvals to enter the country.

More than 140,000 travelers have already been screened at the pilot checkpoints. The program was expanded recently to include passengers traveling on Delta from Minneapolis/St. Paul, American from Los Angeles International, and both carriers from Las Vegas McCarran. In January, US Airways Passengers will be able participate in the program at McCarran. United elite travelers will be invited to join in at some point in 2012 – approval is pending merger of Continental and United’s information systems are combined.

I’d been invited to join PreCheck last October as an American Airlines Premier Executive qualifying traveler. A last minute change of plans recently left me scrambling to catch a flight out of Miami on a stormy and congested Sunday night. Taking the finally-opened airport people-mover from the centralized car rental facility (a pleasant surprise), I checked in at an American kiosk and proceeded to the elite line at the airport’s D-Gates. After my boarding pass was scanned, I was directed to a nearly empty security line – another surprise – as I had been approved for expedited security screening.

Once at the screening checkpoint, I was told I did not need to take off my shoes, remove my belt, or my light jacket in order to pass through the screening device. I did not have to remove my “3-1-1” liquids from my carry-on bag, but I did have to remove my computer from the non-compliant bag. I was through security in under a minute, and on my way to the gate in time to download email before departure.

Qualifying for the Global Entry program requires applicants go through a fairly rigorous screening process in exchange for the right to bypass long immigration and customs lines at US International Airports. Anyone who has the correct credentials can now opt in to the PreCheck program by entering their clearance code in their airline’s security profile – as it is no longer necessary to hold top tier status once CBP approval has been attained.

According to US Transportation Security Administrator Joe Pistole, better information about travelers helps the TSA to say “Now, we don’t have to treat each person as a putative terrorist,” according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek.

While I usually feel most TSA employees act professionally while doing a very difficult and demanding job, I have to admit to wondering if some screeners DO assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Traveling with my 88 year old father at Newark last fall, for example, pre-warning about his artificial hips and other ailments did little to lessen interrogation procedures which seemed inappropriate at best, and extreme considering his physical condition. Terrorist, indeed!

Gaining approval in a Trusted Traveler program is not an automatic procedure, even for those who travel abroad frequently. The process includes capture of fingerprints (done neatly and digitally) as well as an iris scan. For those concerned about information captured from the microchip contained in today’s US passports, questions of privacy may prove to be enough to discourage registration. But compared to biometric data collected by other countries, the tradeoff might seem less onerous – I have saved countless hours of standing in line at increasingly congested gateways. The PreCheck program was an unexpected and welcome surprise.

Applicants should also be aware they will be subjected to an extensive, face-to-face interview at one of the TSA’s International Airport Offices. I faced a 30-minute interview inquiring into my reasons for travel to over 50 countries in the past ten years. As a self-employed individual, I also had to supply a copy of my most recent tax return. An unfortunately, I paid my own registration fee before American Express announced it would reimburse its Platinum Card holders for the cost of the Global Entry program – where approval is valid for a period of five years.

Would I register today knowing how much information was eventually collected? Certainly! It should also be noted there is no guarantee any given passenger will not face more extensive random security checks, whether entitle to PreCheck or not. With as much as I travel, the benefits easily outweigh my concerns – and with PreCheck expanding throughout the country, I’m looking forward to more pleasant surprises.

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Rob Lipman is Executive Vice President of Summit Management Services, an international meeting planning company specializing in pharmaceutical research and incentive programs. He logs approximately 200,000 miles a year and visits at least five continents annually. He is an avid Cranky Flier reader and professes to be in search of “new airline experiences” and the perfect flight.

Guest Post: Top 10 US Airline Stories of 2011 – Bangalore Aviation
The guys at Bangalore Aviation asked me to do a guest post for them on the top stories of 2011 in the US regarding aviation.

In the Trenches: Tipping – Intuit Small Business Blog
We had a very happy client recently who decided we had earned more than we charged him. I had to figure out how to handle it.

The new rules don’t go into effect for a couple of years, but the impacts will likely start being felt sooner than that. After all, when pilots are given more rest, that means the airlines need more pilots to fly their schedules. So the airlines will need to start ramping up before the rule becomes law just to make sure that they’re in compliance. How many more pilots will an airline need? It’s hard to know since every airline is different. It’s not like they’re going to need to double the number of pilots they have or anything, but there will need to be more. Combine that with the end of the retirement holiday we’ve been living under for the last 5 years, and there are going to be a lot of job opportunities for pilots. (When the retirement age for pilots was raised from 60 to 65, that meant 5 years where no pilot would be forced to retire, and we’re getting to the end of those five years.)

Of course, when airlines need to hire more pilots to fly the same schedule, that means costs go up. Again, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just the way it is. So why do I say that small cities will be hurt most here? It has to do with the Flight Duty Period (FDP).

Today, pilots can be on duty up to 16 hours straight, and that’s called the Flight Duty Period. During that time, they can actually fly up to 8 hours (or more if there are unforeseen circumstances). Now, those numbers are changing depending upon when they fly and how many flights they have. So if a pilot comes on duty between midnight and 4a, then he can’t be on duty for more than 9 hours no matter what. If he comes on duty between 7a and noon, then he can max out at 14 hours on duty because that’s more normal for the body’s clock. (There are adjustments required depending upon how long the pilot has been in that time zone.)

But even if the pilot comes on duty at 8a, he can only be on duty for 14 hours if he has no more than 2 flights during that time. It slowly decreases the amount of time he can be on duty until you hit 7 flights. At that point, he can be on duty no more than 11.5 hours.

See how this is coming together? Small cities are the ones served by short hops, and regional pilots have the grueling task of flying many short hops during the day. That kind of flying is exhausting, and that’s why it’s those pilots who are going to see the biggest gains in terms of rest. Costs will go up most as a percentage for the regional airlines, it would seem to me, and that again puts pressure on costs to small cities that are already in trouble.

The rest of the rules impact pilots more broadly. While pilots could actually fly only 8 hours in a duty period before, it’s now up to 9 hours only if reporting between 5a and 8p. Overnight operations are still capped at 8 hours, but it’s important to note that there is no exception anymore. These times are hard cut-offs now. This changes when you have additional pilots on board for longer haul flights, but the framework is roughly the same.

When it comes to rest in between duty periods, that’s changing as well. Today, rest can be as little as 8 hours between the time a pilots is released from duty until the time he’s back on again. That hardly gives the opportunity for adequate rest in many cases. The new rule is 10 hours between periods, and that’s designed so that pilots can get 8 hours of sleep. That won’t always happen of course, but it is an improvement in the rule. And pilot are supposed to tell the company if they haven’t had enough sleep during that rest period. (I imagine that sounds better in theory that what will actually take place.)

There are other rules as well but we don’t need to get into the weeds here. The point is that this will help pilots to be more rested, and that’s a good thing . . . at least, most pilots.

There is a crazy carve-out here that exempts cargo carriers from the new rules, as I mentioned up top. Apparently, the cargo lobbying group earned its money, because this seems impossible to justify in any normal situation. Last time I checked, cargo pilots had the same value to their lives as commercial pilots, so if a certain amount of rest is deemed necessary for commercial pilots, then it should be the same for cargo. It’s probably even more important for cargo since they do much more of their flying overnight, against their natural body rhythm.

So are these rules good? I’m not a sleep scientist, so I can’t comment on if this change is enough, but the method that they settled on – trying to adjust to the body’s clock – seems smart to me. Yes, there will be a cost increase, but at least pilots will be better rested. It does, however, mean there’s even more pressure on the already-struggling small cities.

Wi-Fi coming to international flights – CNN Out of the Office
More talk about what’s happening with United’s decision to put wifi on its international fleet.

First Fine for Tarmac Delays May Not Actually Help You – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
I didn’t write about the tarmac delay fine here, but over on Conde Nast I talked about how it’s not necessarily good news. (Regular readers here won’t be surprised by my stance.)

In the Trenches: Recovering From a Crash – Intuit Small Business Blog
Our web host crashed last week, and that meant we had to revert to a back up plane to keep our clients happy.

There are two pieces to the tax plan, so let’s look at each one separately. (I tend to think the second one is worse.)

Increase the Security Fee

When you travel today, you pay $2.50 every time you get on an airplane up to $5 each way solely to fund the TSA. This tax was invented after September 11, 2001 and in fact, was named the September 11 Security Fee. In the proposed tax change, it’s now known as the Aviation Passenger Security Fee instead but the point is the same. We’re supposed to be funding security activities.

This fee currently only covers 43 percent of the cost to operate the TSA, so the idea is theoretically to close that gap. But that’s not what’s actually going to happen.

The proposal is to hike the fee to $5 each way regardless of how many stops you make. (If you fly nonstop, it doubles from $2.50, but otherwise it stays the same.) But it doesn’t stop there. It’s only $5 now, but it will go up $.50 each year until it hits $7.50 each way in 2017. After that, the Secretary of Homeland Security has free reign to jack the fee up from there, but it cannot be lowered. That’s right, these numbers are minimum floors.

Let’s say you support this. We should be paying for more robust security and you think that whatever it costs is a worthwhile investment. I can understand that argument, but this will make your blood boil.

This fee is expected to bring in $24.9 billion over 10 years. Of that, $15 billion would be “deposited into the General Fund for debt reduction.” That’s right. More than half this revenue won’t help security at all. It will just go to balance the budget. If I’m paying an “Aviation Passenger Security Fee,” it better be going to making me safer. This isn’t going to do that.

A $100 Departure Tax

The second part of the equation is to raise more money by slapping on a new $100 tax every time an airplane takes off. This is supposed to help pay for the use of air traffic control services. The goal is to try to sell this to you by suggesting that it will finally get those fat cats with corporate jets to pay their fair share. That may be true, and you probably won’t hear many complaints about that from the general public.

But it also puts a huge burden on the flights that struggle the most right now – those to small cities. Think about it. A $100 tax on a 747 is nothing. If you have 400 people on an airplane, that’s a quarter per person. Pretty easy to absorb, especially on longer flights when the fares are likely to be relatively high anyway.

What about a 50-seat regional jet? Now it’s an extra $2 per ticket (assuming that plane is full). That might not sound like a lot, but on a $100 ticket, that’s a 2 percent increase and that can push a flight from black ink to red.

What about a 19 seat turboprop? Now it’s over $5 a ticket. If that airplane is half full, it’s $10 a ticket. Those communities that are currently struggling to save their commercial service are going to be dealt a severe blow in their efforts. Small communities have enough trouble keeping service as it is. This just makes it worse.

Sure, there are exceptions for recreational aircraft and air ambulances, but there is still a glaring problem here. This is a bad way to raise money because it hurts the piece of commercial aviation that’s struggling the most to survive right now.

Not smart. Not smart at all. I don’t want to get into the politics of this (though I’m sure you guys undoubtedly will in the comments). Regardless of whether you think there should be revenue increases or not, this isn’t a good way to do it.

[Beech 1900 image via Flickr user jordanvuong/CC 2.0]

By “favorite,” I don’t mean I look at those proposals that are great. I’m talking about those that seem outrageously misguided to me. The point of the program is a good one. Unlike Essential Air Service which just continuously plows money into small city routes, SCASDP is a short term funding plan that requires serious justification. The money should be used for helping to jumpstart new service through revenue guarantees, marketing, etc. There are a few uses but the point is the same. Money is meant to help get a project on its feet, but it won’t be there forever.

There have been successes. SCASDP has been responsible for successful long-running routes from Akron/Canton and Santa Rosa, for example. These are routes that airlines might not have tried on their own, but with the financial backing initially, they found them to be winners. And plenty of airports are trying to do just that right now. Many of these are small cities trying to get connected into a hub. Others are trying to get low cost service, often from Frontier this year it seems.

So which ones stood out for me? Here are 9 of the goofiest ones. I’m sad to say that three of these actually got awarded a grant. Oy vey.

• Albany, New York (WON) – Albany wants money to fund a flight to Houston, but that seems like a waste to me. It already has service from United and Southwest to several cities so it has access to their networks without having to go to Houston. Seems to me that the feds should have looked for proposals that would have had more of a network benefit than this, but the feds liked it and it got partial funding.
• Arcata/Eureka, California (LOST) – Like every other airport, Eureka complains of high fares on its sole flights on United to San Francisco and Sacramento. So what’s the solution? It wants nonstop flights to Denver, on United, the same airline that has high fares today. All this would do is hurt United’s existing service and make the market weaker overall. It won’t lower fares. Delta failed with flights to Salt Lake and Alaska/Horizon failed down to LA. This market just can’t support more service right now, it would seem.
• Bakersfield, California (LOST) – I don’t even get this. Bakersfield wants money to support 2 props a day up to Sacramento on Great Lakes. Without any connecting feed in Sacramento, this is bound to fail. There is a strange suggestion that there will be another 20 people connecting to Portland or Seattle. Really? I can’t see it – people going there would probably just take an existing airline that actually offers online connections.
• Bemidji, Minnesota (LOST) – I’ll give these guys points for creativity. They seem to think that people don’t fly out of Bemidji because they don’t know the airport has flights. So what will they do? Create a travel desk to book flights for people in Bemidji and those coming to town. This just isn’t going to do much since we all know that people coming to town aren’t going to call Bemidji to have flights booked. And locals should know the airport exists – they just drive because it’s cheaper or flights are more convenient from other airports.
• Casper, Wyoming (LOST) – Casper thinks that fares are too high on the short flight down to Denver on United. So what does it want? It wants Frontier to come in to lower fares. It says it asked United to lower fares to levels seen during the 1990s and early 2000s but was rebuffed. Apparently it forgot that fuel has spiked dramatically. So if Frontier comes in, what happens? It could push United to run away because lower fares will destroy the market. Then Casper would be pretty unhappy.
• Dubuque, Iowa (WON) – I love Dubuque because it has had some great, creative proposals in the past that didn’t win. So what happens? The city comes up with a not-so-good one and it wins. Go figure. Dubuque has been losing service and now it only has American Eagle flights to Chicago. What does it want? American flights to Dallas. This won’t help fares and it will likely weaken the Chicago flights by pulling people away. There’s limited additional benefit to Dubuque, but guess what? It’s going to get a shot to see if it works.
• Flagstaff, Arizona (WON) – Flagstaff is like many small cities in thinking that it’s perpetually underserved and it deserves better than what it gets. In this case, that’s turboprop flights to Phoenix. It also says fares are too high. In fact, it says the average fare is $58 one way higher than Phoenix. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me, but Flag thinks it knows that the premium should only be $30 to $35 one way. So Flagstaff wants a new airline to come in. It did have Alaska/Horizon to LA for a brief time but that failed. Why would some other service work? It won’t. But it won a grant, so we’ll probably see someone else come in soon.
• Mammoth Lakes, California (LOST) – Mammoth gets the brass balls award for having the gall to ask for this one. It has been subsidizing year-round flights, but it doesn’t have the money to continue. Without more money, the non-winter flights will probably go away, so it wants the feds to pump more money in. If the service doesn’t work now, then why would federal funds make it work? It wouldn’t.
• Marquette, Michigan (LOST) – Marquette is on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, meaning it’s basically Canada. So it wants service to the state capital, Lansing, because you can only get there via connections today. The problem is that a Marquette to Lansing flight will never have enough demand to support itself, ever. So why bother throwing money down a hole to subsidize it for a short time knowing it won’t work? There’s no good reason.

In the end, the feds selected 29 winners. That means more than 40 percent of applicants got a grant. Not too shabby. There were some winners that I liked to see. For example, I think Auburn/Lewiston, Maine had a good pitch for finally getting its first scheduled flights. I also think Latrobe, Pennsylvania has a good case for trying to further build its newly-acquired flights from Spirit. In fact, I’d say that this year, I probably liked what the DOT did more than in previous years, though clearly we still have some strong disagreements. That’s no surprise. Read the full list of grants here.

But congratulations to all the communities that won new service. Even if I’m skeptical in some cases, I hope that you can all make it work.

[Original photo via Flickr user Jeff Samsonow/CC 2.0]

Does the government have any business requiring such detailed disclosure? What really is the purpose of it? Chime in below.

The GAO’s job is to be a watchdog and to make sure the government isn’t doing anything stupid. As you can imagine, it’s a very busy agency. Not only is it busy, but it does great work. The GAO was asked by a couple of Congressmen to look into a few things around air travel and the result was this report. While it doesn’t draw many conclusions other than saying more info is needed, it makes a very clear assessment of what’s been happening, and not just with the tarmac delay rule.

But let’s start with that rule, since it’s the most visible piece of the review. The GAO said that yes, long tarmac delays had been almost completely eliminated due to the rule. No surprise there. But using multiple statistical models, the GAO found that flights were more likely to cancel between May and September 2010 than they were in that same period in 2009, before the rule was in effect. Here are the details.

But just because flights are more likely to cancel, does that mean it’s because of the rule? Yes, that’s exactly what this chart is isolating.

Results from the tarmac-cancellation model suggest that the implementation of the tarmac delay rule is associated with a greater likelihood of cancellation for flights that taxi-out onto the tarmac. . . . Results from the gate-cancellation model also indicate that the tarmac delay rule is associated with a higher rate of flight cancellation.

The GAO calls out the DOT for its brand of analysis, saying that the DOT analysis is “limited because it includes only a portion of all flights, considers the total number of cancellations instead of the rate of cancellation, and does not control for other factors that can affect cancellations.”

The report is a great read, giving a very clear explanation of the situation that should be required reading for anyone interested in this topic. Maybe some of the so-called “flyer’s rights” activists should cuddle up with this and educate themselves.

For its part, the DOT is ignoring this report saying that the rule needs tweaks, at least publicly. A recent blog post from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the agency’s “analysis shows that our new protections have not directly affected cancellation rates, though we continue to monitor and study these.” Uh huh. I really hope they’re going to seriously study them instead of paying lip service, but I’m somehow skeptical. Shocking, I know.

If you’re curious about the rest of the report, there were some other interesting findings. GAO was asked to look at whether cancellations and delays were more likely at smaller airports, and sure enough, they are. The agency calls out the DOT for not collecting the right data to show this. Since only larger airlines are required to report to the DOT, the data is skewed since smaller cities are served by smaller airlines that don’t have to report performance information. The GAO study worked with FlightStats to get a more complete picture and found dramatic reductions in reliability for smaller towns.

The other piece was around the passenger protections in Europe. We’ve talked about the strict rules in the European Union here before, but is it a good thing? I think the result is not a surprise. “Care and compensation requirements provide protections and benefits for passengers whose flights are disrupted, but they also increase costs to airlines and could increase passengers’ fares.” It also said that the rules aren’t clear and there are real challenges in the way it’s set up.

So what’s the upshot of all this? There were two recommendations for the DOT that came out of this.

• Collect and publicize more comprehensive on-time performance data to ensure that information on most flights, to airports of all sizes, is included in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ database. DOT could accomplish this by, for example, requiring airlines with a smaller percentage of the total domestic scheduled passenger service
  revenue, or airlines that operate flights for other airlines, to report flight performance information.
• Fully assess the impact of the tarmac delay rule, including the relationship between the rule and any increase in cancellations and how they effect passengers and, if warranted, refine the rule’s requirements and implementation to maximize passenger welfare and system efficiency.

That last one is sort of fluffy in that it doesn’t really tell the DOT to do anything. But maybe now that there’s a concrete report from a fellow government agency, the DOT will take notice and do something about it. (Stop laughing. It could happen. Um, sure it could.)