The Loma Prietan
December 2000/January 2001
San Francisco Airport: Questions & Answers
Letter to Richard Zimmerman,
Chair of the Loma Prieta Chapter’s
San Francisco Airport Task Force:
Dear Richard:
I’m an ardent supporter of a clean, free-flowing, ‘unfilled’ bay, but your arguments and solutions that you write about for our air traffic delays at SFIA don’t appear to "add up." If you want to convince the citizens of the Bay Area to defend the health and well-being
of this ecological treasure, you must report on real and attainable solutions.
Some of the ‘hazy’ ideas in your recent Loma Prietan article include: ‘demand management techniques,’ technology being installed at SFIA,
a technology left out by RAPC, and regional airport cooperation.
What do these ideas mean and
how do they work? Are they actually
feasible ideas? Some of your reported arguments that are highly debatable include:
(1) Increased aircraft noise. The FAA, who is responsible for the future control and routing of the aircraft arriving and departing on the proposed runway configuration at SFIA, claims there will be less noise for surrounding communities, especially on the Peninsula where residents are the most frequent complainers of aircraft noise.
(2) Increased flights. SFIA’s plans don’t appear to include adding more than the four runways they already have. Their plan is to spread them out so they can land two aircraft at a time during bad weather when the vast majority of delays supposedly occur. This doesn’t increase the number of flights, but rather allows all the flights that were originally scheduled to land without extensive delays.
(3) New large aircraft by Airbus. Unlike what you’ve reported, the new generation of "double-decker" Airbus might not fit on the taxiways at SFIA today. The taxiways may be too narrow and SFIA is unable to widen them because of their proximity to the runways and terminals. It’s a "catch-22" because these new planes might relieve the overcrowded skies, but aren’t able to operate into SFIA as configured.
In future articles, please include
solid details about the solutions to the airport delays at SFIA and help us with the argument against "bay fill" at SFIA. For those of us who have to defend this argument, we need to know what these ideas and solutions are and how they’ll work.
I look forward to your reply.
John Farwell
Loma Prieta Chapter member
Richard Zimmerman’s Response and Clarifications:
Dear John:
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my recent article in the Loma Prietan. In the past year or more, I’ve covered most of the things you found ‘hazy’ in previous LP articles. Nevertheless, I will take this opportunity to reiterate some of the relevant facts. My "It’s Over" article was essentially a response to the lack of a thorough understanding of this issue among Chapter members. You indicate that you favor a clean, unfilled Bay, yet then go on to use the Airport’s questionable arguments in favor of new runways. I hope that you would question SFIA on ‘hazy’ and unsupported ‘facts’ as well.
For starters, ‘demand management’ is a collection of system management techniques to reduce the number of planes using a particular airport. It consists of a variety of components. The Regional Airport Planning Committee included the following items as part of demand management:
• Using larger aircraft between the Bay Area and Southern California. Currently over 35 percent of the flights out of SFIA go to Southern California. Reducing that number would help air travelers arrive at their destination sooner, not later. By the way, no one has proposed new, larger aircraft for those routes.
• Additionally, the number of flights to Southern California could be capped. SFIA has a flight to LAX every 20 minutes. Do we really need that?
• Demand pricing. This would simply be making the airlines who want to land at busy times pay more.
• Reduction of commuter flights. This would cut the number of small commuter planes landing at SFIA.
• Reduction of general aviation flights. There are a number of other airports in the Bay Area for small general aviation flights. Moving those out of SFIA would increase the airport’s capacity without expanding the runways.
The technology currently being installed at SFIA is SOIA/PRM (Simultaneous Offset Instrument Approach/ Precision Runway Monitor). This has been discussed in previous Loma Prietan articles. This technique will allow poor weather capacity at SFIA to be 38 to 45 planes per hour, depending upon which airport document you read. I should point out that SFIA is fond of reporting that their arrival capacity is cut from 60 to 30 flights in bad weather, implying that they need 60 planes per hour. In fact, they rarely exceed 50 planes an hour in even good weather conditions.
The technology that was left out of the RASP is AVOSS (Aircraft VOrtex Spacing System). This was tested in July 2000 at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The FAA expects it to be operational in "three to five years." It is expected to increase capacity by 10 to 15 percent at airports. But the point here is that RAPC ignored current technology. How many other techniques did they ignore in their rush to turn out a report? It’s difficult at this point to know for sure.
Regional airport cooperation would simply mean forcing airlines to schedule flights elsewhere in the Bay Area. The Sierra Club has forced SFIA to look at this by amending SB 1562 (the Burton Bill). Growth patterns in the Bay Area are
to the south and northeast. As we all know, the Peninsula is crowded in terms of housing, surface transportation and airspace.
Regarding your concern about the accuracy of my arguments, I would first point out that SFIA openly acknowledges that they will increase their capacity by almost 30 percent with the new runways. And they’ve added that to their lists of reasons for building the new runways. Of course, more planes means more noise. One reason for the increased capacity is the fact the proposed runways would not necessarily intersect. That would allow planes to land and takeoff at the same time, something they cannot always do currently.
The FAA recently gave a good indication of how they will treat surrounding communities complaining about noise. First, they enacted new regulations saying that planes above 3,000 feet do not create noise. Of course they do, but it’s now defined as "not an environmental issue" by the FAA. Second, in the Environmental Impact Statement for SOIA, the FAA said it was necessary to re-route planes landing at SFIA over parts of San Jose. And since the planes were over 3,000 feet, it was not supposed to be a problem. Only a strong reaction from San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales forced the FAA to reconsider.
Probably only a single community (Millbrae) would see noise reduction. No airport data show decreases for other communities. In fact, with additional flights, we might expect more noise for selected commnities.
One of the core questions is if SFIA is allowed to build the runways, will it end delays at SFIA? The answer is no. Not even SFIA claims that. Nor do they claim their foul weather capacity would ever be the same as their fair weather capacity.
A study conducted by SFIA found that, with perfect conditions at SFIA, only 80 percent of the planes would be
on-time. The data from that study indicated only an average
of 35 planes a day might be helped by new runways. That’s out of 600 arrivals every day. Do you think that’s good enough to destroy a large portion of San Francisco Bay?
On the New Large Aircraft (NLA), Airbus and Boeing disagree with you. SFIA acknowledges that the new large aircraft (NLA) could land today. I assume they include taxiing. The problem is that two NLAs can’t land at the same time and there would be a disruption in the landing pattern when one came in. Airbus even says their version will fit in the same envelope as the 747-400, the current largest aircraft.
How much of a problem is that? SFIA forecasts less than 10 NLAs a day by 2020 or less than one per hour. These planes could be easily accommodated without destroying San Francisco Bay.
Finally, RAPC and SFIA have stated that the new runways will not have sufficient capacity to meet forecasted demands
by 2020. In fact, they expect SFIA to run out of its increased capacity sometime around 2015. The proposed runways would take 10 years to build, so we wouldn’t see them before 2010. That means the useful lifetime of those runways is around
five years.
So we spend $3.5 billion, destroy an irreplaceable national treasure, and we don’t even solve the problem in the long-term. Shouldn’t we look into real solutions now? The answer is yes. And that is what the Sierra Club Loma Prieta and S.F. Bay chapters will continue to do while this battle forges on.
Thanks again for taking the time to read my article. If
you would like to read other articles on the SFIA runway expansion, check out the Loma Prieta Chapter web site at www.lomaprieta.sierraclub.org.
We need people to get involved. If you want a clean, free flowing and unfilled Bay, please consider joining our task force. Only you can save San Francisco Bay for future generations. See also my web site at www.ProtectOurBay.com.
Richard Zimmerman