Thirty-three years ago, when William B. Cotton became an airline pilot, it was the event of the hour for a plane to land or take off at many airports. The relatively few travelers able to afford an airline ticket were treated like royalty in the friendly skies, from the linen tablecloth service in the first-class cabin to the early Boeing 747’s coach-class lounge, where musicians entertained passengers at the piano bar. Unfortunately, none of it–the time saved or the absolute treat of air travel–lasted very long. Cotton, a 747-400, 757 and 767 captain and United Airlines’ director of flight management who will grudgingly start a new career because of the Federal Aviation Administration’s mandatory age-60 retirement rule, is more than an aviator. He is recognized as the “Father of Free Flight,” an emerging navigation concept that represents the best hope of rescuing the country from aviation gridlock. Cotton also has directed air-traffic control and flight systems at United. His last flight is Friday.
Q: Commercial aviation in the United States has achieved a record level of safety in recent years while at the same time business is booming–the airlines carried 664 million passengers in 1999. But an epidemic of delayed and canceled flights has sapped the patience of most air travelers. What has gone wrong with the system?
A: There is a lot of sky up above, but we’re just not making good use of it because of restrictions to flight that have been in place since World War II. We’ve got to remove those obstacles and make changes on the ground as well as in the airplane if we are to expand capacity to meet the demand.
The FAA’s thinking has traditionally been: “Our system is only capable of handling one route between city A and city B, and you will fly it when we tell you and at what altitude and you will not deviate. It’s single file, no passing, even if the airplane you are flying is normally flown at a faster speed than the aircraft in front of you. And if there is a thunderstorm in the way, too bad. Stay on the ground.”
Since the mid-1990s, the FAA has begun to move away from the policy of trying to dictate everything the carriers did. But the transition to Free Flight, which is shorthand for freedom of flight, is taking forever and I am very worried that it is not going to happen in time to prevent a lot of the congestion in the years to come. It’s the next five years that I’m most concerned about.
Q: If the economy continues to grow and the airline industry lives up to the projections of more and more flights to serve all the people who want to fly, what will the picture look like over the next five years?
A: Unfortunately, more of the same. The delays will continue to show up when the weather is bad. The airlines will seek to fly outside the normal routings in order to avoid the horrible congestion. The flexibility of the system won’t be nearly enough to accommodate everyone who wants to fly the alternate tracts, however. It puts delays on everybody. The changes, I’m afraid, are going to take 10 to 20 years for full implementation because the pieces of technology were not available until quite recently and it will take time to refine the tools and certify them to a level of reliability in which everyone can be comfortable that accidents won’t result.
Q: Is that going to be fast enough?
A: Oh, I’m afraid that we have some very credible and well-researched studies predicting complete gridlock by 2003 to 2005. It would mean the delays are such that it is no longer profitable for the airlines to continue operating. If last summer and this summer are any indication, we are seeing gridlock starting to happen right now.
Q: How do you handle a plane full of unhappy passengers who face being delayed on the ground for hours because of weather-related or air-traffic control problems?
A: It’s a terrible situation. They are like hostages, and so are we up in the front of the airplane. You’ve got to be upfront, tell them everything you know, which often is not as much as you’d wish. And then, start to grant some amenities quickly. Bring out the drink carts and radio for some extra food if you can, show a movie or two. You’ve just got to do something to keep the people from going stark-raving mad back there.
Q: The first time I flew was in the 1960s and I’ll always remember that passengers dressed up for the flight, even if they were going on vacation, and their behavior was beyond polite. When the plane landed, the entire cabin would break out in applause. How have passengers changed over the years?
A: First, flying used to be an unusual experience. Most people, unless you were very rich or very famous, only flew because of an emergency or during a very special occasion. Passengers felt much more like guests and now they feel, well, they definitely don’t feel like guests for the most part. When something doesn’t go the way it has been advertised, they get irate more easily and are much less understanding. Expectations keep going up faster than the ability to match them.
Q: Free Flight is not a single tool, but rather more than 70 high-tech programs intended to create additional capacity, in zero visibility or clear skies, by replacing hundreds of aging ground-based radars that are expensive to maintain with perhaps only a couple dozen global positioning satellites (GPS) that provide the location of aircraft with pinpoint accuracy. Where did Free Flight begin and how do you envision it working?
A: Free Flight is a concept that I coined the phrase for and that I have been working on ever since I did my thesis work at MIT in 1965. It’s a whole new way of doing business. About 1994, I proposed to the FAA that we separate airplanes in a radically different manner. There will be protective bubbles, called alert zones, around each aircraft to alert the pilots and air-traffic controllers well in advance of two or more aircraft that are on a possible collision course. But otherwise, the air-traffic controllers, who now are basically traffic cops, don’t have to do anything–just let the airplanes fly wherever they want instead of the current system of a limited number of highly congested air lanes.
The concept is analogous to visual flight rules–see and avoid other aircraft. If you ask any light-plane pilot, except when flying in the traffic pattern near an airport, when was the last time you actually had to maneuver to avoid another plane, he can’t think of it. There’s a tremendous amount of sky up there and only a fraction of it is being used.
It’s out of the question to operate with see-and-avoid rules for commercial airline safety. But it is becoming possible to use computing power and GPS and data communications between airplanes to customize flight routes and use the airspace in a much more efficient way. So Free Flight is an end state that takes the maximum advantage of using the airspace so that every flight can be planned to be as safe, efficient and as short as possible. You can leave when the book says you’re supposed to leave and arrive on time.
Q: Controllers I’ve talked to agree that the procedures you’ve described are safe but say they are no substitute for having additional runways. Do pilots share the concerns about the increasing amount of acrobatics in the sky, whether it is the piggy-backing of arriving airplanes or expanding the use of converging runways to land and depart planes at the same time in order to increase capacity?
A: You don’t want acrobatics in the sky or anything else that makes either a controller or a pilot uncomfortable. But the political reality is that runways are very hard to build, very expensive and environmentally they are almost impossible to get approved. So you have to do everything technologically possible to use the runways that we do have more efficiently. Using pilot-navigated procedures and GPS, it’s not aerobatics anymore. It’s very strictly controlled and easily monitored.
Q: In September, the City of Chicago will submit to the federal government its almost $4 billion “World Gateway” program to construct terminals and aircraft gates at O’Hare International Airport. What should the city be doing that it isn’t doing to build what experts call a “smart airport”?
A: Let me talk as Bill Cotton, not as United Airlines. You know about the idea of a western access road to relieve the congestion of cars trying to get into the airport. They’ve really got to tune that up again. And there needs to be a serious discussion about additional runways.
Q: Yes, United’s chairman, Jim Goodwin, among others, has been outspoken about the need for at least one more runway. But the Daley administration has said it won’t consider either runways or more surface roads to the airport until 2012 when the World Gateway construction is completed. Your thoughts?
A: It seems to me that to look at adding a lot of gates and flights without simultaneously addressing the capacity issue is shortsighted. There are some people in the Chicago Department of Aviation who are very aware of the need to increase the airfield capacity at the same time terminal space is being expanded. You have got to work it as a whole system. A piecemeal effort won’t solve the problem, but the political realities can’t be swayed, unfortunately, by the facts.
Q: How has being a pilot, with the opportunity to visit many places, affected your life?
A: It happened fairly early in my flying career that the perception of your neighborhood begins to expand. You grew up as a kid and knew all the back alleys and the good routes to ride your bike. When you start flying, looking at the ground, in a couple of years the whole country feels like your neighborhood. You can go to sleep, wake up a couple of hours later and know exactly where you are just by identifying landmarks. And that expanded when United became an international airline. The whole planet becomes like your neighborhood. .
My experience has been overwhelmingly good, and it sure was fun.
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An edited transcript
