McCarran flight delays have tripled in '99

Flight delays have more than tripled at McCarran International Airport this year, the Federal Aviation Administration says.

A six-month suspension in existing landing and take-off procedures at the airport and unseasonably bad weather in the Midwest in the year's first quarter contributed to a surge in commercial flight delays for the first five months of 1999.

According to a survey by the FAA, commercial flight delays at McCarran surged 210 percent to 1,455 for the first five months this year from 470 in the same period last year.

But McCarran has one of the lowest flight delay rates among 20 of the nation's busiest airports, even though it has slipped in ranking to sixth position last year from third in 1997. The airport, which has about 800 operations daily, averages 6.7 delays for every 1,000 flights.

"We've had abnormal weather conditions in the first five months in the Midwest which created huge traffic delays systemwide that affected McCarran," said Randy Walker, McCarran's director of aviation.

"If the airplane en route from, say, from Denver to Las Vegas can't take off in time, it's bound to impact everyone else," Walker said.

Another factor behind the traffic delay is an ongoing dispute over safety between the FAA and the Air Line Pilots Association on how a landing procedure called "land-and-hold" should work.

The procedure, which involves planes' movements on the ground, is at issue at any airport where a major runway intersects with another, such as in Las Vegas and Honolulu. In Las Vegas, a pair of parallel runways cross near the southwest corner of airport.

"While the FAA is working out this issue with the airline and pilot union, the maximum hourly flow rate, or the number of airplanes you can fly in and out of McCarran in an hour, is reduced," Walker said.

"When you have one plane coming in from the north, another plane that's trying to take off from the west will have to wait until the first plane lands and clears the runway before it can take off. This has led to some reduction in capacity which creates delays during high-peak periods," he said.

FAA spokesman Mitch Barker said the pilots' union and the agency are continuing to negotiate on land-and-hold rules at airports across the country to attempt to curtail delays.

The land-and-hold procedure, which is the ability to land an aircraft and have it stop short of a given point so that another plane can take off on a separate runway at the same time, is a procedure executed at airports that have intersecting runways.

If that procedure can not be executed, a plane has to exit the runway before the second plane could land in order for the operation to be absolutely safe, said Bill Klein, McCarran's operations manager.

"McCarran has intersecting runways because the plane has to take off against winds coming from several different directions," Klein said. "So we need runways that point to different directions to take advantage of the winds.

"There are two north-south runways and two east-west runways for primary landing and departure. If the winds are from the west, we would use the east-west runways."

A greater demand for flights has further underscored the need for McCarran's air traffic control system to be modernized to accommodate growing traffic, said Walker.

McCarran's largest air carrier, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, said McCarran's flight delays have had little effect on its on-time performance.

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