<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Click here to listen to PM aviation correspondent Barbara S. Peterson talk about the FAA&amp;#039;s high-tech plans for air traffic control on The Popular Mechanics Show podcast!  WASHINGTON, May 23 \u2014 I wanted to be sure that I was on time for the FAA&amp;#039;s briefing on rising airline delays, so I booked a flight that would give me plenty of breathing room in case something went wrong\u2014as it so often does when you travel by air these days. Instead, my flight from New York&amp;#039;s Kennedy Airport landed at Washington Dulles a full half-hour ahead of schedule, so I spent my unexpected windfall of time cooling my heels in an airport coffee shop.  Even that bit of serendipity was a reminder that things are not well in the nation&amp;#039;s airspace: My plane wasn&amp;#039;t going any faster than usual. It only arrived &amp;quot;early&amp;quot; because airlines pad their schedules to offset frequent air traffic control delays and weather-related snags. And if anyone had any doubts about delays bedeviling air travel, Federal Aviation Administrator Marion Blakey squashed them during the press conference this morning at her agency&amp;#039;s national Command Center. &amp;quot;Last year was the worst in history for airline delays,&amp;quot; Blakey told the gathered press. &amp;quot;And we know that we are going to have a tough summer ahead&amp;quot; of late flights and missed connections. (This week, the national weather service forecast an increase in the number of hurricanes and tropical storms this season.) Then she announced an expansion of a year-old &amp;quot;airspace flow control&amp;quot; program. It&amp;#039;s designed to minimize weather delays in congested airspace by giving airlines the choice of sitting out the delay on the ground or flying longer routes around a storm. The FAA&amp;#039;s action will cover the country&amp;#039;s most congested regions, including most of the East and the Midwest, reducing the ripple effect in which one storm-tossed area affects air traffic throughout much of the country. In addition, the FAA is giving controllers software called &amp;quot;adaptive compression,&amp;quot; which will fill landing slots that might otherwise have gone unused, in order to maximize airport capacity.  Blakey also called on Congress to support a long-sought overhaul of the country&amp;#039;s aging air traffic control system, which depends on World War II vintage radar and analog radio communications to guide planes along preset &amp;#039;highways&amp;#039; in the sky. &amp;quot;We have to move to a more automated, space-based system,&amp;quot; she said, referring to a plan that would supersede the present ground-based network of navigational beacons.  As she spoke, a large display on one wall showing the day&amp;#039;s traffic backups revealed a major problem at Chicago&amp;#039;s O&amp;#039;Hare Airport, where a radar outage was causing flights to be delayed all through the Midwest. &amp;quot;The problem isn&amp;#039;t airports, it&amp;#039;s the airspace,&amp;quot; said Mike Sammartino, director of system operations at the FAA.  Managing that airspace is the mission of the people who work in the vast, windowless room where the briefing was held, just five miles from Dulles Airport. They don&amp;#039;t actually control flights; instead, they&amp;#039;re studying air-traffic patterns as well as caucusing by phone every few hours with control centers across the country in order to reduce delays and reroute planes around traffic backups. The command center has been nicknamed &amp;quot;Big Brother&amp;quot; because of its giant screen that shows where all planes are at all times in U.S. airspace. Aircraft are represented by fuchsia dots that, in heavily trafficked areas, coagulate into what resembles a blood stain. At any given time, there are more than 6000 planes in America&amp;#039;s skies\u2014as many as 8000 at peak times. Air traffic grows 3 to 4 percent each year. This year, it will exceed 209 million passengers in the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The number of daily scheduled flights has risen to nearly 55,000 on busy summer days.  Blakey said that the FAA is working with organizations such as NASA, Mitre, NOAA, Lockheed-Martin, Sensis and Metron to develop software that forecasts alerts on individual routes experiencing heavy traffic and bad weather. A test of the new software is expected this summer. The software is a preliminary step towards what the FAA has dubbed NextGen air traffic control, which would use the satellite-based GPS to give both pilots and controllers on the ground a better fix on the location of planes, reducing the separation buffers between planes. A major holdup has been how to finance the new system, which is expected to cost $40 billion over 20 years; the FAA has proposed shifting more of the costs of air traffic control to general aviation operators, a move that has drawn strong protests from private pilots. \u2014Barbara S. Peterson PM NEWS: FAA Expands Airspace Flow Program EARLIER: Peterson Takes a Test Drive on the Airbus A380, Peterson on the Airbus Mega-Jet Mess "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a1676/4217158/>