The New York Times
August 8, 2001

Delta Says U.S. Must Be Ready for a Surge in Air Traffic
By Joe Sharkey

You think the air-transport system is crowded now? Just wait, says Leo F.
Mullin, the chairman and chief executive of Delta Air Lines.

"Last year we had about 680 million people who traveled by air" in the
United States, Mr. Mullin said in a recent interview in Atlanta, where Delta
is based.

"The F.A.A. has projected that number will be one billion people in the year
2010," he said. "And that one billion can be forecast with a great deal of
accuracy because these people exist. They may be 15 years old now, but 10
years from now they're going to be 25 years old and entering their
professional - and travel - lives. It's one of the easiest extrapolations
you can make. A billion people are going to travel by 2010, and we are
having grave trouble satisfying demand with 680 million passengers right
now."

In the last year, Mr. Mullin, who will mark his fifth anniversary as Delta's
boss next week, has emerged as the industry's point man in a nascent drive
to change public discourse over the troubled air-transport system. Now that
we've blamed and cursed the airlines for delays and deteriorating service,
Mr. Mullin thinks it's time to accelerate the debate on what he insists is
the real solution to our air-travel woes: a major expansion of airports in
the United States.

Other views - opposing, amplifying or otherwise - are hereby solicited for a
follow-up column on this subject. Meanwhile, Mr. Mullin has the floor.

"What we need to do is create a tremendous expansion in the system," he
said. Besides accepting significantly more air traffic at lesser-used
secondary airports, as airlines dispatch small regional jets on
ever-more-important feeder routes, the country needs to commit to building
50 miles of new runways at major airports by 2010, he said. At about two
miles a runway, that's 25 new runways. Right now, fewer than a dozen are
even in the planning stage, and it often takes five years or more to get a
runway approved.

"Fifty miles of new runways at 25 airports throughout this country would
largely solve the problem" of air-system gridlock by 2010, he said, given
the already planned technological improvements in government and airline
air-traffic management.

Naturally, there is a hitch, and that is the influence of good old American
Nimby - not in my backyard. In the case of air traffic and the considerable
noise and other annoyances associated with it, that backyard can stretch
from the airport fence to the farther reaches of a metropolis.

Mr. Mullin, a Harvard trained engineer and mathematician, was a banker in
Chicago and ran Conrail in Philadelphia before joining Delta. He is unusual
in an industry in which some top executives cower behind public relations
assistants who themselves use secretaries to dodge reporters' phone calls.
He doesn't dodge controversy.

"There are obviously issues associated with putting in new runways" because
"communities in all of these major metropolitan areas have built right up to
the edge of the airport," he said.

A top priority, he said, is a proposed major expansion at O'Hare
International Airport in Chicago, where local opposition has intensified as
plans have advanced. "In my very strong judgment, and I think it's shared by
my competitive colleagues in the industry, expansion of O'Hare is absolutely
crucial not only to Chicago but to the aviation system in America," he said.
"But it is in fact tied up in all these environmental issues and
community-concern issues."

Over the last decade, he said, airlines have sharply reduced aircraft noise
"far in excess" of levels mandated by governments. "The noise around
airports is on the order of one-tenth per airplane of what it was back in
the late 1980's," he said. "Of course, there now is a problem obviously
created by increased frequency of flights. The noise from an individual
airplane might not be as great, but if you have more airplanes flying in,
you're still going to have those difficulties."

Airports ballooning into adjacent neighborhoods is even more controversial.
"When we had to expand on the fifth runway here in Atlanta, it went into the
town of College Park," Mr. Mullin said of a new runway being built as part
of a $5.4 billion expansion at Hartsfield International Airport.

"There was a major convention center in College Park, and the end of the
runway reached right up to that point. So the convention center had to be
torn down, and various residences had to be moved."

To serve national air-transport needs, some communities are necessarily
going to be made unhappy, just as they are when highways expand into
developed areas, he suggested.

In Atlanta, for example, "the next level of expansion, which I would see in
the year 2010, is going to have far more serious consequences in terms of
the number of households that are going to have to be moved and hotels taken
out and so forth," Mr. Mullin said. Similar "community disruption" will
occur at other expanding airports, he added.

Like the rail system of 100 years ago, the air-transport system, he argued,
"is a fundamental component of the economy of this country."

To Mr. Mullin, that means laying concrete and building, even if some people
oppose it. "It is going to create those problems, and communities are going
to have to debate these things out," he said. "But at the end of the day,
the option of not having an efficiently operating air-travel system is not
an option at all."

Comments?
(Joe Sharkey's e-mail address is jsharkey@nytimes.com)


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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