AirportBusiness Blogs

The Environmental Protection Agency this week announced that it is joining the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration to establish a “set of guiding principles for designing, building, and operating federal facilities.” It is part of the sustainability movement, around for some time but which just began working its way into the airport environment during the past several years.

This week’s announcement focuses primarily on making federally owned facilities more efficient and friendlier to the environment. EPA, via a program called Energy Star, also offers businesses and public facilities advice and tools for making existing facilities more efficient, etc. (Visit http://www.energystar.gov/buildings). The program is touted as having saved government some $10 billion in 2004 while reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s worth a look.

For airport terminals, in particular, sustainability is being incorporated into the architectural design, energy systems, worker movements, and on and on - all in the name of making facilities more efficient, the workplace safer, and the impact on the environment over the long term. It costs more up front, but long term is projected to bring significant savings. Anyone considering significant facility construction will want to check it out. (AIRPORT BUSINESS magazine, during the past year, has featured several articles on sustainability; visit www.airportbusiness.com.)

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Related:

• Sustainability, Its Implications
• The New Buzz: Sustainability
• The 21st Century Terminal

Initial estimates put the attendance at this year’s Schedulers & Dispatchers Conference, hosted by the National Business Aviation Association, at just over 2,000. It seems like at least twice that many.

It’s been said before and should be stated again: Any airport, fixed base operator, or other aviation business that wants to market to the business aviation sector needs to be here. Just as the National Airports Conference, put on by the American Association of Airport Executives, is successful first and foremost because of its intimate environment, so too with Schedulers. NBAA has always limited the booth presentation to one 10×10 booth (though through the years some have had side-by-side booths) and basically tabletop displays. The idea, as NBAA’s Kathleen Blouin explains, is for the little guys to have the same level of exposure as the big guys. Interestingly, the “big guys” love the environment.

This is an event that makes it easy to touch customers. There’s talk that next year NBAA will ease up on the booth restrictions, and Blouin says the association is looking into it. This is a jewel, and allowing more jewels to be added to the exhibit floor could cause the event to lose its luster. Of exhibitors I spoke with, all seem to be in agreement that they’d prefer a raising of the exhibit space rates versus grander booths. At Schedulers, that would just get in the way.

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Some things in aviation might be considered history in the making. San Antonio’s Stinson Airport is history. The city and TXDOT are investing heavily to revitalize Stinson and when completed it will be transformed into a business aviation-friendly airport - one that has the feel of landing in a time warp. Look for more in the March issue of AIRPORT BUSINESS.

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The airline business, to say the least, is a study in contrasts. Recent reports from Boeing and Airbus would have an observer think, considering the record aircraft orders being placed, that the airline business is booming. Add FAA’s projections for passenger forecasts and the rose is in full bloom. Except that the petals - the air carriers - seem to fall off the flower faster than it can reproduce. Delta, Northwest, and United remain in bankruptcy protection; overall, the airline industry loses money regularly. It would seem a non-sequitur.

The Wall Street Journal took the DOT Secretary to task this week for “musing on the possibility” of a merger of Delta and Northwest; this at a time when DOT appears opposed to a full merger of the Skyteam alliance. The Journal would like to see fewer market constraints and clearer direction from DOT. Seems fair. It also seems fair that a new global market is upon us, and it calls for new rules for the game. One start may be in changing the laws as they relate to foreign ownership of carriers; the next, which the U.S. has actively been pursuing, is open skies.

To paraphrase Monty Python, the time has come for something completely different.

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Wireless, the salvation for many travelers married to their laptops, has to date been pretty much a customer service versus revenue opportunity issue, or both. Officials at Boston Logan say it’s a safety and security issue as well. Continental Airlines disagrees.

Massport, which operates Logan, charges $7.95/day for its wireless service; Continental offers free wireless to customers in its President Club lounge at Logan. The debate is currently being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission, to which Continental formally complained last July.

As one might expect, airline and tech groups are siding with Continental; airport groups with Massport. Regarding the latter, it would seem that for airports the overriding issue here is one of control. On that score, an observer would have to agree.

That said, I continue to be convinced that it’s a customer service issue first and foremost. Unless, of course, Massport can demonstrate that security is indeed a concern. Interestingly, the Transportation Security Administration has yet to weigh in on the debate.

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Speaking of TSA, some interesting reports have been coming out of late:

- The Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General, in an analysis of TSA’s start-up expenditures, says it cost the agency as much $143,432 per screener in its recruiting efforts - that in Topeka, KS. The better news is it only cost $38,215 per screener at Juneau, AK. Those are the high and low levels in the report.

- TSA reports that its bomb detection “puffer” machines should be in place at the 40 busiest U.S. airports by this spring. Reports say a puffer can screen a passenger in 17 seconds, which is expected to significantly impact wait times, while analyzing particles as small as a billionth of a gram. Now we just need to keep an eye on exactly what particles are being examined.

- The Business Travel Coalition reports that a recent online survey of business travelers it conducted show that biz folks still think it takes too long to get through passenger screening. And they think it’s going to get worse if a Registered Traveler program isn’t implemented in the near future. From this seat, the RT program does not have panacea written all over it.

- And, another report suggests that the current passenger processing in place takes a toll on TSA employees. A Labor Department report says the rate of screeners injured on the job is some 29 percent, down from 36 percent a year ago but well above the 4.5 percent injury rate for other federal workers.

Some see progress. TSA is being held accountable for costs; “puffers” are being put in place; Registered Traveler is slowly becoming a reality; and, the high rate of on-the-job injuries should diminish as technology replaces direct labor in the screening process. Yet, it might be suggested that it’s time to bring together architects, designers, airports, airlines, and TSA into one room where they can tackle head-on the real issue - finding an entirely new way to address passenger screening at airports.

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As of this Thursday, January, 5, Independence Air, based at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, will cease operations. Its parent, FLYi Inc., cites the inability to garner new outside investors as the reason. It’s been an uphill struggle from the beginning in 2004, when the former Atlantic Coast Airlines, a profitable contract feeder for United Airlines, decided to go it alone as a carrier following Uniteds bankruptcy protection filing. In all, some 2,500 of 2,800 employees will be immediately laid off.

Many questioned Independence’s prospects for success from the start, suggesting that disconnecting from United was not the wrong decision; having a stand-alone airline built on regional jets was. Reports say United and JetBlue intend to fill some of the void at Dulles.

One question is, what does this do for the Dulles staff, which is already involved in a whirlwind of construction and capacity activity? The other is, what happens to its RJ fleet? According to Denver-based The Boyd Group, which specializes in airline analysis, there are currently some 1,500-plus RJs in the U.S. fleet today a number which the firm says is about 200 too many.

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Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly easing up on its Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) rule, notably by allowing for an option by which smaller facilities that store less than 10,000 gallons of oil/fuel can self-certify their SPCC plans. Also of note is that reports suggest EPA is also backing off of a strict requirement that calls for secondary containment for fuel trucks at airports. The latter proposal has been, at best, controversial from the start; at the worst, it’s bureaucracy gone wild. Fixed base operators and others transporting fuel on airport grounds can be forgiven (perhaps not by EPA) if they remain unclear from the exact requirements, based on published reports to date.

This is a part of the SPCC rule that makes little sense. Worst part is, after 15 years of looking at what regulations were needed for airports for the handling of fuel and oil products, EPA suddenly gets interested in secondary containment for refuelers. I remain convinced it’s because someone at the agency finally decided to visit an airport to see exactly what they had been regulating all these years.

(Note: Environmental attorney Bonni Kauffman will provide an in-depth analysis of the new requirements in the February issue of AIRPORT BUSINESS.)

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