By Jenna Pizzi/The Times of Trenton
on February 26, 2013 at 7:00 AM, updated February 26, 2013 at 7:01 AM
EWING — Executives at Frontier Airlines, the only commercial airline that operates out of Trenton-Mercer Airport, said passengers could see more flights diverted to other airports and a flurry of other inconveniences if $600 million in federal budget cuts goes into effect as planned on Friday.
“It makes it more likely that the flight would have to divert and make it less reliable,” senior vice president Daniel Shurz said yesterday.
The across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester would force the Federal Aviation Administration to furlough workers, cutting midnight shifts at 60 air control towers nationwide and closing 100 towers at smaller airports, officials said.
Trenton-Mercer Airport is on a list of 200 airports with fewer than 150,000 flight operations or 10,000 commercial operations a year, from which the FAA would choose as it cut shifts.
Mercer County director of transportation Aaron Watson said an FAA-operated control tower is not required for planes to take off and land at an airport, but many pilots prefer to have a tower.
County Executive Brian Hughes, Frontier executives, Watson, Shurz and other officials met with Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno yesterday afternoon at the airport to discuss the effects of the sequester.
“We have a very real possibility of the closure of the tower,” Hughes said.
Guadagno declined to speak to the press, but Hughes said after the meeting that she said Congress could resolve the federal budget impasse quickly.
“The lieutenant governor was very clear that she felt that we could reach a compromise,” he said. “I think that they might come up with something. I think the majority of (New Jersey’s) delegation will be able to reach a deal. How it goes across the county — I wouldn’t care to take a guess at that.”
Shurz said medium-sized and large airports use air traffic control towers to coordinate takeoffs and landings, but at Trenton-Mercer pilots tend to communicate with the tower to learn about the conditions they can expect when they land.
The staffing uncertainty may mean that Frontier will have to divert more flights to other airports, especially if the weather is bad and pilots would prefer not to land without assistance from the tower, he said.
“You can live without it but you don’t want to,” said Shurz. “This is not a good situation.”
The tower is usually manned by a seven-person staff from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
Shurz said Frontier has no plans to pull flights from Trenton-Mercer, at least in the short term.
“We intend to operate as planned,” he said. “We have a flight schedule planned beyond Friday and passengers.”
Source: http://www.nj.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment