It's not really hard to understand why flights have been cancelled and delays are increasing at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport recently -- they're the results of problems that have been quietly worsening for decades, warns one helicopter pilot who flew at that airport for 15 years.
Air traffic control equipment failures have been blamed for flight delays in recent weeks, but that equipment is desperately in need of replacement with modern systems before down time and glitches result in the loss of lives, he says.
And the problems faced by Newark airport are also a problem at airports nationwide.
In some airport control towers, for instance, they're still using 1990s-style floppy discs.
A study released last year shows Houston airports at par with others with regard to air control staffing.
But of course problems at other airports can significantly affect us here in Houston.
For instance, because of concerns about Newark, United Airlines has cancelled 35 round-trip flights each day between Houston and Newark.
And while the efficiency of systems used by air traffic controllers and their associates have been slowly worsening for decades, nothing big, such as an extended national air traffic system outage, has occurred that would draw headlines and attention to the issue.
But attempts to improve safety and efficiency among air traffic controllers have been thwarted for decades, according to Mike Hatten, a helicopter pilot who once operated for 15 years out of Newark Liberty International.
"Vice President Al Gore ran an airspace modernization program back in the '90s, they made recommendations, money was appropriated, money was put into accounts for modernization of the system, and then -- it was never done," he says.
"I don't know which political party, I don't care, I just know the money leaked out from where it was allocated into other projects and...here we are today.
"That's why I say this is inexcusable. This is really a leadership failure on all the leaderships up to this point.
"You have three very complex airspace systems up there, one for Newark, one for LaGuardia, and one for JFK [airports], not to mention Teterboro corporate airport, which is very close to Newark. I have to give the controllers credit for moving traffic in and out of those complicated airport systems safely. These are consummate professionals who keep these planes safe and more important keep them safely separated," added the former air safety expert.
"But one controller [at Newark said recently] he couldn't see anything for 90 seconds. That is an eternity in aviation, not being able to see your screen or tell planes where to go!
"And many years I used to go on tours of air traffic control towers and it was terrible even then. You've got these green scopes that look like the oscilloscopes on 1950s submarines or on the Pearl Harbor radar back in the '40s, the initial early radar. Not trying to be too dramatic, but I mean it literally looked that bad.
"This administration I think will do the right thing, I think they see the problem has fallen at their feet and I think we're going to see some drastic action, but it will take a while, to get all this equipment bid, bought, installed. And then there's the training.
And perhaps most important, there need to be lots of new controllers hired."