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Hurricane Isabel Causes Airline Delays
Aired September 18, 2003 - 15:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, if you're thinking of catching a flight to the Eastern corridor or from that area, forget about it. Flights have been canceled and some airports have stopped operations.
CNN's Patty Davis has more on the travel delays from Herndon, Virginia. She's at the Federal Aviation Administration's command-and- control center -- exclusive access, we might add.
Patty, what can you tell us?
PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, we are getting now into the afternoon rush hour. Thursday is the busiest day of the week for air travel. And here comes Isabel.
Now, here, we're joined by the FAA's -- the head of this command center, Jack Kies.
JACK KIES, FAA TACTICAL OPERATIONS MANAGER: Hi, Patty.
DAVIS: How really bad is it out there? Why don't you show us on the map here?
KIES: Well, you can see, looking at the traffic situation display, we have in the range of 6,000 airplanes in the system. And by virtue of the density here, without Isabel, that same density would be up and down the mid-Atlantic right now.
So we are seeing a definite reduction in the number of airplanes in our system. By now, I would say we'd have about 7,000, 7,500 airplanes in the sky.
(CROSSTALK)
KIES: We're down about 1,000 right now.
DAVIS: How do you know when enough is enough in terms of a hurricane? I mean, you deal with thunderstorms all the time. But how do you know when to clear planes out of an area?
KIES: Well, more often than not, we discuss this on a strategic planning telecom.
The dispatchers, the pilots, the air traffic controllers and the airport operators all weigh in with the latest information. Wind in this circumstance is typically the determining factor. Our towers are stressed to take up to a certain amount of wind. If it gets up around 65 knots, we would expect our controllers to begin to abandon those towers.
DAVIS: Well, and there's some in Virginia or North Carolina that have been evacuated.
KIES: That's true, indeed. But safety is also the issue. And debris flying around an airport with sustained 65 mile-an-hour winds or more, it's just unsafe for anybody to be out there.
DAVIS: Where are we seeing the big delays right now because of the hurricane?
KIES: Well, the biggest delays are probably in the airports where there aren't the degree of service that we're used to, so Washington-Dulles, National, Baltimore, most of that service has been cut almost to the bone. There's very little activity there.
In the Northeast, La Guardia and Philadelphia airports are both running about 90-minute delays into and out of those airports, simply because of the wet wind that is requiring those airports up and down on a single runway. Without that force of wind, we would be using multiple runways and we wouldn't have to run ground delay programs.
DAVIS: Now, you're not having problems only with Hurricane Isabel. There's another weather problem out there. What is that?
KIES: This is a big country we're looking at here. And you can see, right in the middle of it, we've got a significant amount of thunderstorms there.
Now, airplanes are going to avoid thunderstorms. They're dangerous business, no matter how you slice it. And so we have to reroute transcon traffic around that thunderstorm activity. Today, we're even using Canadian airspace and we're routing airplanes up into Canada.
DAVIS: OK, great. Thanks, Jack Kies.
KIES: My pleasure.
DAVIS: The head of the command center here at the FAA's center in Herndon, Virginia.
One thing the FAA is stressing, along with the airlines, is, make sure that you call your airline to make sure that that flight is running, a lot of cancellations going on right now. You don't want to go to the airport and get stranded there, have nothing to do once you get there -- Kyra, Miles.
PHILLIPS: Well, Patty, looking sort of ahead, just quickly, is there any type of feeling or, I don't know, best guess, I guess, on when everything will be up and running normally? Is there a certain time by tomorrow they might think, OK, things will be flowing on a regular basis?
DAVIS: Well, interesting. I was just talking to Jack before this interview. And he was saying, probably not until noon again. What were you saying, when everything will be back up and running? Noon Friday?
KIES: That's what they're shooting for.
DAVIS: OK. So even noon Friday until things get back up to normal. So it's going to be quite a while that people's travel plans are going to be disrupted -- Kyra.
PHILLIPS: All right, Patty Davis. OK, thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired September 18, 2003 - 15:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, if you're thinking of catching a flight to the Eastern corridor or from that area, forget about it. Flights have been canceled and some airports have stopped operations.
CNN's Patty Davis has more on the travel delays from Herndon, Virginia. She's at the Federal Aviation Administration's command-and- control center -- exclusive access, we might add.
Patty, what can you tell us?
PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, we are getting now into the afternoon rush hour. Thursday is the busiest day of the week for air travel. And here comes Isabel.
Now, here, we're joined by the FAA's -- the head of this command center, Jack Kies.
JACK KIES, FAA TACTICAL OPERATIONS MANAGER: Hi, Patty.
DAVIS: How really bad is it out there? Why don't you show us on the map here?
KIES: Well, you can see, looking at the traffic situation display, we have in the range of 6,000 airplanes in the system. And by virtue of the density here, without Isabel, that same density would be up and down the mid-Atlantic right now.
So we are seeing a definite reduction in the number of airplanes in our system. By now, I would say we'd have about 7,000, 7,500 airplanes in the sky.
(CROSSTALK)
KIES: We're down about 1,000 right now.
DAVIS: How do you know when enough is enough in terms of a hurricane? I mean, you deal with thunderstorms all the time. But how do you know when to clear planes out of an area?
KIES: Well, more often than not, we discuss this on a strategic planning telecom.
The dispatchers, the pilots, the air traffic controllers and the airport operators all weigh in with the latest information. Wind in this circumstance is typically the determining factor. Our towers are stressed to take up to a certain amount of wind. If it gets up around 65 knots, we would expect our controllers to begin to abandon those towers.
DAVIS: Well, and there's some in Virginia or North Carolina that have been evacuated.
KIES: That's true, indeed. But safety is also the issue. And debris flying around an airport with sustained 65 mile-an-hour winds or more, it's just unsafe for anybody to be out there.
DAVIS: Where are we seeing the big delays right now because of the hurricane?
KIES: Well, the biggest delays are probably in the airports where there aren't the degree of service that we're used to, so Washington-Dulles, National, Baltimore, most of that service has been cut almost to the bone. There's very little activity there.
In the Northeast, La Guardia and Philadelphia airports are both running about 90-minute delays into and out of those airports, simply because of the wet wind that is requiring those airports up and down on a single runway. Without that force of wind, we would be using multiple runways and we wouldn't have to run ground delay programs.
DAVIS: Now, you're not having problems only with Hurricane Isabel. There's another weather problem out there. What is that?
KIES: This is a big country we're looking at here. And you can see, right in the middle of it, we've got a significant amount of thunderstorms there.
Now, airplanes are going to avoid thunderstorms. They're dangerous business, no matter how you slice it. And so we have to reroute transcon traffic around that thunderstorm activity. Today, we're even using Canadian airspace and we're routing airplanes up into Canada.
DAVIS: OK, great. Thanks, Jack Kies.
KIES: My pleasure.
DAVIS: The head of the command center here at the FAA's center in Herndon, Virginia.
One thing the FAA is stressing, along with the airlines, is, make sure that you call your airline to make sure that that flight is running, a lot of cancellations going on right now. You don't want to go to the airport and get stranded there, have nothing to do once you get there -- Kyra, Miles.
PHILLIPS: Well, Patty, looking sort of ahead, just quickly, is there any type of feeling or, I don't know, best guess, I guess, on when everything will be up and running normally? Is there a certain time by tomorrow they might think, OK, things will be flowing on a regular basis?
DAVIS: Well, interesting. I was just talking to Jack before this interview. And he was saying, probably not until noon again. What were you saying, when everything will be back up and running? Noon Friday?
KIES: That's what they're shooting for.
DAVIS: OK. So even noon Friday until things get back up to normal. So it's going to be quite a while that people's travel plans are going to be disrupted -- Kyra.
PHILLIPS: All right, Patty Davis. OK, thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
