Objective: Reduce Delays

The FAA has limited the number of flight operations at Florida's Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and may expand the use of two lesser-traveled runways in hopes of reducing delays.

But airport neighbors most affected by noise from traffic using those two runways are hopping mad -- saying the government has failed to take them into account.

"It's absolutely unfathomable that they would do this because it takes noise impacts out into neighborhoods in an unprecedented way and would destroy the quality of life in large parts of the community," Broward County Mayor Kristin Jacobs told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

But the FAA says there are few alternatives to deal with an increasingly congested airport where delays are becoming more the rule than the exception. Almost one-third of the 12,000 commercial flight operations staged at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood in the first two months of this year were late arriving or departing, according to the FAA.

Traffic problems have plagued South Florida for more than two years. ANN reported in December, 2003, on flight delays at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport. That led the FAA to start limiting the number of non-commercial flights into and out of the airport.

The FAA is now limiting the number of arrivals into Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood to 28 an hour. Almost all of that traffic uses the main north runway. The FAA's plan, now under consideration, would send most of the unscheduled business and general flights to the airport's south runway between 0800 and 2000 local. Over a six month trial period, that traffic would also be funneled toward the crosswind runway.

But air traffic is growing in volume by ten percent a year at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and many aviation types in South Florida believe it's only a matter of time before the airport will have to be expanded. Eventually, they say, the FAA will have to build more runways or send some of that traffic to other airports.

FMI: www.broward.org/airport