Senate acts to speed update of air traffic system

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a bill Monday that would speed modernization of the nation's antiquated air traffic control system, a major source of airline delays.

The $34.5 billion bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration through Sept. 30, 2011, also contains several measures to boost safety in response to last year's crash of a regional airliner near Buffalo, N.Y., which took 50 lives.

The bill requires key elements of the FAA's NextGen program — it replaces World War II-era radar technology with GPS technology — to be in place at the nation's busiest airports by 2014.

The new system is projected to cost the FAA as much as $22 billion through 2025. Airlines would have to spend up to $20 billion more to install equipment in their planes.

In the long term, the system is expected to save airlines money by allowing planes in crowded air corridors to take more direct routes and fly closer to each other without safety risks, reducing delays, saving energy and cutting down on pollution, including greenhouse-gas emissions. Pilots will have real-time information on the location of other aircraft.

The system is crucial to handling the expected growth in air traffic from about 700 million passengers in 2009 to more than 1 billion annually by 2023.

The U.S. lags behind other nations in making the transition to the new technology, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a key sponsor of the bill. Even Mongolia, he said, is further along.

"It's embarrassing," Rockefeller said.

The bill also:

• Raises the minimum number of hours of flying experience an airline co-pilot must have from 250 hours to 800.

• Bans pilots from using personal electronic devices in the cockpit, a response to an incident in October in which pilots of a Northwest Airlines plane flew more than 100 miles past their destination of Minneapolis while they were working on their laptops.

• Contains a "passenger bill of rights" that would require airlines to provide food, water and other amenities to passengers kept waiting on tarmacs and give them the opportunity to deplane after a three-hour wait.

That would give legal status to Transportation Department rules adopted in December that also limited tarmac waits to three hours and would fine airlines up to $27,500 per passenger for violations.