Winging It: A gust of criticism sweeps in after snow

When eight inches of snow unexpectedly blankets the region, the inevitable result isn't much different at Philadelphia International Airport than it is on city streets or interstate highways.

Traffic jams happen, and the one at the airport that trapped some travelers Wednesday morning was a doozy, causing hundreds of flight delays.

About 100 snow-covered airplanes parked at gates overnight had to wait in a conga line almost two miles long to be deiced at the airport's western end. Those planes then got in a similar line, crawling back to the eastern end as they waited to take off. Dozens of arriving flights trying to reach the terminal had to be threaded through the deicing and takeoff lines.

The process was so slow and annoying that one Southwest Airlines pilot, whose flight from Pittsburgh took 45 minutes to reach a gate after landing, told his passengers this was the worst airport he'd seen in 28 years of flying. The pilot's exasperated words were reported to me by Steve Lapin of Melrose Park, a frequent business traveler and contributor to my Winging It blog, who was on the flight.

I've never been held hostage on an airplane at another airport under similar weather and traffic conditions, so I can't say how Philadelphia stacks up.

I do know PHL is compressed into a much smaller piece of land than most major airports, especially for one that is a hub accommodating more than 1,300 daily takeoffs and landings. Its runways and taxiways are closer together than those at many of the other big airports.

I also know that PHL goes into high gear when snow falls. Starting late Tuesday, crews of airport employees and contractors worked through the night to clear snow from runways, taxiways and ramps around gates.

By 7 a.m. Wednesday, the crews had removed enough snow so both of the long east-west runways were open and the taxiways and ramps were mostly cleared, acting airport director Mark Gale told me. One of the long runways was closed again about 10 a.m. for roughly 35 minutes so snow could be removed from a shorter, north-south runway that intersects with it, he said.

The movement of the planes on the ground is the job of traffic controllers working in three airport towers. The Federal Aviation Administration runs the tall one near the river, where one set of controllers directs airborne traffic and another group directs planes on the taxiways after landing and before takeoff.

US Airways, as the airport's hub carrier with close to two-thirds of the flights, directs the ground traffic around all terminals once the FAA hands it off. Big-jet, or mainline, traffic is worked from a tower between Terminals A-East and B. The US Airways Express division handles commuter flights from a tower atop Terminal F.

US Airways suffered as much as any carrier during the big jam, its officials said. The average time its arriving flights took to reach gates was 27 minutes, and a couple of them took about an hour. The average "taxi-out" time - from pushback from the gate to liftoff - for US Airways flights was 74 minutes, and one flight took almost three hours to get airborne, the airline said.

So what happened to the Southwest flight? US Airways said, and Southwest agreed, that it was under the FAA's control for about 44 of the 45 minutes it took to reach a gate after landing.

The FAA hasn't responded to my request for an explanation of why it handled the Southwest flight the way it did. Without question, both its and US Airways' ground controllers have a difficult job trying to keep all the traffic moving. I will report the agency's answer when I have it.

In the meantime, Gale said he would as soon as possible convene a meeting of airline, FAA and airport representatives to review what happened and avoid a repetition.

"I'd like to consider this the anomaly and not the norm," Gale said. "We believe some coordination work needed to have occurred" among the three control towers. "I'm going to dig into it and see that it doesn't happen again," he said.

Thousands of folks who flew in or out of the airport on Wednesday will be eager to see the results.

Last week's column, http://www.philly.com/philly/business/38791557.html, posing the question whether all talking on cell phones while driving should be banned, brought a spirited response. Out of 35 e-mails, phone calls and comments posted online, about 80 percent were in favor of a ban.

Several respondents said they would support a ban but believe it would be unenforceable. And almost all mentioned their own experience of watching slow or erratic drivers creating a hazard as they yakked away on their phones.

It's never too late to give us your thoughts.