The Clash Over The Runways (page 3 of 3)

In this February BCDC hearing in downtown San Francisco, the airport is losing round one. The BCDC commissioners are sitting at long tables shaped in a U. They are facing a speaker at a podium and rows of chairs crammed with environmentalists, journalists, and Calerdine, who is doing his best to keep a grin on his face as he shifts in his seat, although at times he looks like he might strangle someone.

At the podium is independent aviation consultant George Williams, hired by the BCDC to analyze SFO’s delay problem. A former manager in the air-traffic division of the Federal Aviation Administration, he looks like the man in the gray flannel suit, a good bureaucrat. But his message that new runways are not the only solution to delays runs decidedly against SFO and the FAA, both of which are banking on new landing strips to solve the problem. In fact, the airport division of the FAA will likely grant tens of millions of dollars to SFO for expansion should the runway plan be approved.

Earlier in the day, Williams issued a written summary, declaring that a lengthy, SFO-funded analysis of its delay problem "appears to have done nothing more than inject subjectivity to the predetermined outcome." Now, he is telling the commissioners that SFO has failed to take into account state-of-the-art navigation systems for jets and air-traffic-control towers, and hasn’t carefully explored alternative flight paths into and out of the airport. These new technologies and routes could smooth out congestion in the skies, he offers, and significantly reduce delays—without new runways being built into the bay. SFO, he says, "should become aware, informed, and participate in these new efficiencies" and then "decide whether or not to expand."

Following a procession of environmentalists chiding the airport for its short-sightedness, Calerdine sheepishly takes the podium. He informs the commissioners that "we recognize that filling the bay is a last resort." He commends Williams on the report but says he would like to "change the impression on a couple things." (Earlier he had told me that when he read the report at home, he slashed through it with a pencil, shouting, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!")

"The report seems to indicate that we’re not recommending any combination of various alternatives," he says. "Nothing could be further from the truth." He tells us the airport "has done extensive modeling of the entire Bay Area airspace and explored all the navigation technologies." Just recently, he says, the airport purchased an advanced $25 million radar system that will allow more planes to land in bad weather and reduce a small percentage of delays; it’s currently in the process of being installed.

After a short break, Calerdine returns to the podium and tells the commissioners about the airport’s plan to "mitigate any environmental impact" of the runways by purchasing bay land and salt ponds and converting them to wetlands. As he projects a colorful graph of vanished wetland sites on a screen, I notice that Williams leaves the room. I follow him. When he comes out of the bathroom, I stop him and ask if he can help me understand the delay problem. For instance, what about these figures from the Department of Transportation that always appear in the newspaper, claiming SFO is one of the worst airports in the nation for delays?

"They’re nothing," he says.

"Pardon me?"

"They only measure performance—whether an airline gets its planes to a destination within 15 minutes of a scheduled time. They have nothing to do with actual air traffic."

When you get down to the heart of the problem, Williams says, "almost 90 percent of delays are caused by airlines. That can be everything from a sick pilot to no ice on board, from a late crew to people standing up and trying to put their luggage away."

SFO’s delay problem is not necessarily worse than other airports, he tells me. One set of numbers will claim SFO "is the fourth most delayed airport in the nation, while another will say it’s the 27th."

Blaming delays on any single source is a dubious practice, he says, as up to 90 factors contribute to arrivals or departures past scheduled times. In his own detailed study of delay, bad weather is responsible for fewer than 5 percent of delays.

"So how can SFO say that 95 percent of its delays are caused by weather?" I ask.

"I have no idea. They’re using a set of numbers that may be valid in their own mind. I can’t validate them."

"Earlier, didn’t you say you once worked in a control tower?"

"I managed the whole FAA in California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and all of the Pacific. All of the air traffic. Everything belonged to me—all the towers."

"So why do you think SFO is gung ho on building these new runways?"

"Let me ask you this. If I was going to give you $20 million to expand your house, would you do it? You can either use this $20 million to build on your house or I’ll give you nothing."

It’s a sly reference to the pressure that the FAA’s airport division is putting on SFO to build the runways.

"The airport division’s only goal is to give away money and build infrastructure," Williams says. "That’s all they do. Change procedures? ‘Hell, no,’ they say. ‘We gotta give you money.’ ‘Bring in a new technology?’ ‘Why, no, we gotta give you money.’"

The power of money: It’s the one thing that makes people involved in the controversy nervous. "Don’t write this down," they tell me outside meetings. "But of course SFO has feet of clay. Of course the FAA wants the airport to build the runways. The FAA has never seen any piece of land or water on the face of the earth that it didn’t want to pave."

To SFO and the FAA, building new runways is the most expedient way to get more planes in and out of the airport. It’s simply the way they’ve always done business. And the pressure to get the contractors rolling couldn’t be more intense, as complaints about delays, amplified by the mayor and the business community, rain down on SFO like a bad storm.

There’s no question that local skies are congested. Popular place, this San Francisco. And more people are flying into and out of the Bay Area every year—an increase of about 3 percent annually—and the airlines are happy to accommodate them. The nation’s deregulated airline industry means that airports can’t turn away planes that want to land here, nor tell them when they can fly. If United Airlines, which operates more planes at SFO than any other company, is fearful of the competition and wants to launch planes from Los Angeles to San Francisco every 20 minutes, nothing can stop it, delayed customers be damned.

But what is questionable are SFO’s claims that new runways will eliminate delays. SFO calculates delays mainly by measuring the time of day they occur, if the weather at the time was clear or cloudy, and the rate at which they occur for each flight. Based on those methods, blame falls squarely on conditions at the airport. But when Williams expanded his study beyond airports and focused on the minute-by-minute operations of a major airline, he found that weather is a small percentage of what keeps us stranded.

What’s more, policy analyst Peter Thorner, on behalf of environmentalists, using SFO’s own figures, stresses not how many delays occur under cloudy skies, as the airport does, but how many delays take place during good weather. By his calculation, 80 percent of SFO’s delays would have occurred regardless of the weather. Given that info, Thorner says, "new runways will do little to relieve delays." Beyond the number crunching, though, the picture gets darker.

Critics say even if SFO does get the green light to build the runways, the landing strips will not provide any relief for ten years, which is about when they will be completed. And even then, it’s doubtful they could handle all the new folks who will be flying. Countless times, observers have posed the rhetorical question to me: Has adding new lanes ever eliminated traffic on the freeways?

At UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, Geoffrey Gosling’s campus office is stacked so high with journals and reports on airports and aviation that I’m thinking his knowledge of the subject is a little scary. An airport-planning specialist who has been a consultant to metropolitan airports, including SFO, he’s a penetrating critic, his remarks punctuated by his British accent.

In all probability, he says, in 2010, "San Francisco airport is going to be back at the BCDC’s door saying, ‘Whoops, I guess we need not just two runways in the bay; we need three and four.’ In fact, there’s a very real likelihood that the BCDC will find itself in a situation where they will have to approve an outboard runway at Oakland. Talk about stagnation and effects on circulation: Imagine how much worse it will be when we do the same thing to the bay in Oakland as we do in San Francisco."

Can SFO reduce delays without building into the bay? Gosling thinks so. First of all, he says, the consumer market will correct some of the congestion. As more aggravated fliers light out for Oakland and San Jose, traffic numbers at SFO could begin to fall. Similarly, airlines themselves, tired of being hammered by customers for their being delayed, are unlikely to add future flights to the airport.

Such market shifts are not music to SFO’s ears; like all airports, it is in business to attract customers. But building new runways—which, after all, is making room for more planes—to gain a competitive advantage strikes more than one critic as imperious. Should SFO and San Francisco profit, they ask, at the expense of the region’s environment?

Environmental groups are heralding a series of region-wide remedies that could reduce congestion. These include a joint airport authority to orchestrate travel among all of the area’s planes, trains, and automobiles; high-speed ferries or trains to transport people between airports; and new air-traffic-control technologies that could reduce congestion. Gosling offers that anyone looking for a long-term solution should also consider a fourth major airport, such as commercial use of the Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield.

But the ruckus over delays, Gosling says, has been blown out of proportion, mainly by El Niño in 1998, when SFO really was socked in for a few days during the Christmas season. Yes, the Department of Transportation considers a plane delayed if it misses its scheduled time by 15 minutes. But the difference between waiting for a plane for 14 minutes or 16 minutes is meaningless, not to mention tolerable. It’s true that delays are longer in lousy weather. But most delays are tallied in less-than-stormy skies. "Even if flights are delayed 20 minutes, people aren’t going to stop flying," Gosling says. "But standing back and looking at the bigger question, if you only consider the average delay, you would ask, ‘Do we really want to incur all these environmental costs just to save some passengers ten minutes?’"

Ultimately, it’s the question that we as a regional community must face. After we see that delay figures—and the economic projections fashioned from them—can be viewed from any side of the looking glass, and that new runways will not provide lasting relief, we are left staring at the despoilment of the bay. The airport argues that any ecological damage will be offset by its plan to restore the wetlands. But environmentalists counter that bartering the runways for wetlands is specious, as restoration is doing just fine on its own.

Looking ahead, Gosling and other critics told me, the airport’s economic focus on delays will be too bright for the regulatory agencies to turn away from. If they had to bet on it, analysts would put their chips on SFO’s getting its permit to fill the bay in some configuration. I leave the campus a little stunned. If this can happen today, how did we manage to protect the bay in the first place? All I can think of is: There’s always time for another drive.

Here at the Berkeley Marina, it’s a supernaturally clear morning. The bay is a sea of blue ice caps stretching to Angel Island and beyond. In every direction, the cities, bridges, and green hills seem to glow, every detail magnified by the sun.

"Nice day, isn’t it?" says Sylvia McLaughlin.

We’re walking slowly along a grassy path in the marina’s Cesar Chavez Park, not because McLaughlin is 84 years old, but because I keep stopping to look across the open bay, imagining the urban congestion that would have been there had it not been for her.

It’s not hard to imagine that this spry woman with the shining energy, wearing red walking shoes to match her red windbreaker, gave birth to the environmental movement in the Bay Area. Many say McLaughlin and her friends, Catherine Kerr and Esther Gulick, launched the environmental movement in the nation.

A very simple story, really. The three ladies got together in Kerr’s Berkeley hills home in 1960, served almond cookies, and decided to save the bay.

Back then, the city of Berkeley had big plans. On the west side of I-80, it planned to dump two square miles of fill into the water (about the same amount as SFO wants today), encourage developers to erect hotels and office buildings, construct a second freeway, and build a new airport right where we’re standing, with runways that extended across the bay.

At the time, McLaughlin, the wife of a UC Berkeley geologist, and her friends—soon to be known as the almond-cookie revolutionaries—knew nothing about standing in the way of the bulldozer of progress. But in the next ten years, they learned. They sent out flyers, protested at city-council meetings, and spoke to children at schools. A wave of support began rising, gathering people and politicians along the way and finally cresting in Sacramento, where the legislature authorized the BCDC as the legal keeper of the bay.

It’s astonishing: The powerhouses that McLaughlin and her friends stopped from turning the bay into real estate included Bechtel, Bank of America, former San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto, Santa Fe Railway, the Port of Oakland, Crocker Land, and David Rockefeller.

"They all said the economy would suffer if the Bay Area didn’t go along with them," she says, adding that there are always alternatives to big developers’ dreams, just as there are to the airport’s plan.

As we walk along the marina, I keep asking, "How did you do it? How did you beat the developers? Did you talk about ecology? The economy? Alternate sites?" And McLaughlin keeps looking at me like I’m crazy. For the last time today, we stop and look toward the Golden Gate Bridge, across the water.

"We just wanted to look out on the open bay," she says. "It was the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen."

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Kevin Berger is San Francisco’s executive editor