CAPACITY ENHANCEMENT AND AIRSPACE REDESIGN

In order to enlarge and enhance Philadelphia International Airport, several million dollars worth of reports were carefully contracted for and controlled to demonstrate its worth; first extend a north-south runway which would send or bring flights in over Haverford 7.5 miles to the north.  Never mind that the runway won’t consistently  be used because it intersects at right angles with other runways.  A number of communities along its flight path from Lower Merion, Haverford, Lansdowne to Tinicum raised objections to increased noise and air pollution from unburned jet fuel with its additives. There was token planning for economic development to be created by FAA’s juggernaut approach or fuzzy reasoning about the infrastructure for safety or parking caused by spending over $30Million on the runway to shave less than a few minutes off flight delays, for which other methods exist but that were quickly eliminated from consideration. 

Citizen participation has been sparse; most fail to see the impacts on quality of life best summarized by one person saying, “I don’t hear any airplanes over my house.”  Tell that to residents of Tinicum who will receive several million dollars to shut them up and to retroactively soundproof their homes or to anyone who has lived and been distracted under a low flight path. The concerns were not coordinated with the Eastern Delaware County Council of Governments to which Haverford doesn’t belong; the runway extension would jut further into Delaware County where 2/3 of the airport already lies.  Citizen protests fell mostly on FAA’s deaf ears.  Delaware County initially allocated $36Thousand to investigate the runway extension, even confabulating it from the outset with FAA’s next phase – the real deal – airport expansion, then aborting the runway extension study after spending $10Thousand, which is a drop in the bucket, and not holding major public meetings.  One congressman belatedly sent a representative to Haverford to sign up the concerned . Do the concerned really need to sign up when the elected community leaders have already gone on record with their concerns?

Airport Capacity Enhancement studies are still taking place in the presence of great uncertainties in the air travel industry to which most of the benefit will accrue; the net result will be to move around facilities at the airport  for passengers, security, air freight, baggage handling and parking.  Massive security concerns and expenditures in this time of relatively limited terror fanaticism is likely to offset other improvements in emplaning and deplaning efficiencies that would be made.  Airport parking will continue to overflow and sprawl into Delaware County by increasing the size of parking lots, costs of using them and bringing into play the use of ground transportation loop vehicles and other automotive services.  The economic advantages to Delaware County of parking lots and other facilities appear to be unplanned for, if not minimal or even undesirable.  Impacts of airport expansion would acccumulate and not be solvable by adding air traffic controllers; first flights increase, second personnel costs are expensive and, third, the current crop of controllers is reaching retirement en masse (remember the firing of air traffic controllers in the mid-1980's?) necessitating that FAA train a batch of new ones at considerable expense.

Next, Airspace Redesign is being done by FAA which controls the flight patterns, takeoffs and landings; by definition that’s in the space between your rooftop and straight up. Instead of sending most of those flights east and west along the Delaware, FAA wants to fan and spread them out over nearby residential communities including Haverford, Swarthmore and others; that means a substantial increases in noise, air and water pollution; these are quality of life concerns.

The economic impact – necessary for balancing with environmental impact – on Delaware County is perceived as minimal. Jobs in construction are short-term. The airport, as Mayor John Street has expressed it in a radio interview, is Philadelphia’s and control over it (and its jobs) would not be relinquished; that means patronage and in the airport lexicon, being a worker from Delaware County is not exactly a plus.

Instead of developing an overall coordinated investigation for the Airport,  FAA’s efforts were designed to steamroller any opposition by piecemeal separation and division of the Runway Extension from the Capacity Enhancement and finally to impose the Airspace Redesign on the municipalities of Delaware County and the surrounding areas.  For the most part, but with notable exceptions, those communities closest to the airport would receive the greatest environmental impact.  By this clever separation of planning phases, FAA has ensured that coordinated municipal opposition to expanding Philadelphia International Airport couldn’t or wouldn’t take place. Thus, the unwanted, undesirable, unplanned and adverse environmental, economic and social impacts could not or would not be organized or clearly expressed. 

By taking this approach to expanding Philadelphia’s airport into Delaware County, the Federal Aviation Administration is proving it is one heartless spendthrift agency which, when armed with a presidential Executive Order – to paraphrase one state senator –  doesn’t do the right thing either when no one or everyone is watching.

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