Needed: Better Highways in the Sky

THE SHRINKING AIR

ON today's crowded airways, the chances of mid-air collisions are increasing at a fast rate. Every day.

pilots estimate, there are four near-misses on commercial flights. In the 600 m.p.h. jet age coming over the horizon, the problem will grow even more serious. As a result, an angry argument is rocking U.S. aviation. The Air Force, already flying jets, and the airlines, soon to get them, charge that the Government's air traffic control system is hopelessly obsolete, and that no new system is being devised to take its place. For that, they have long blamed the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which polices the airways, and its boss, Frederick Billings Lee.

This week, under heavy fire from commercial airlines tacitly backed by the Air Force, CAAdministrator Lee sent his resignation to the White House and quit after nearly ten years with CAA; into his job stepped CAA's deputy chief, Charles J. Lowen Jr.

Professional airmen -- and airline passengers--have good reason to worry about the CAA's control system.

The rules for instrument (IFR) and visual (VFR) flight which were good enough when planes were few and slow, are dangerously dated with thousands of speedy private, commercial and military craft crowding the airways. And the situation will get worse with jets.

To be economical, fuel-gulping jets must make high-speed letdowns from cruising altitudes and land immediately. But under today's controls, such high-speed penetrations are too dangerous to allow over airports with dozens of planes milling about. Thus, jets will have to wait their turn, cost more to operate and lose much of their speed value for travelers.

What the Air Force and the airlines want is a new, almost fully automatic traffic system to control every plane in the sky with electronic precision. Operating with radar, to find the planes and compute their positions at all times, the system would be able to handle all traffic at all altitudes, almost exactly like the railroad block system controls trains. About 85% of all plane movements would be handled by automatic signals from ground equipment; pilots would be told exactly where and when to let down for a landing, be unerringly guided through a slalom of checkpoints well clear of other planes. The equipment would take an estimated two years to develop, another four to install. Cost: a whopping $1 billion. But, as Air Force MATS Commander Lieut. General Joseph Smith says: "The cost of a mid air collision between one of our 6-473 and a passenger-laden Super-Connie could buy a lot of control." So far, the CAA has been reluctant to push such complete airway control.

One big reason is that private pilots are dead set against it, and they pull increasing weight in U.S. aviation. Of 8,963,000 hours flown in civil aviation last year, 70% were flown by private flyers. Furthermore, they own all but 1,175 of the 59,000 U.S. airworthy civilian planes. Yet only 9% of the pilots have instrument ratings necessary to fly on fully controlled airways.

Thus, private flyers fear that they will be knocked out of the air by an automatic control system. They demanded Lee be kept at CAA. However, airmen say that private planes will have their own segment of airways to fly on; later, they may be asked to buy a simple radar beacon to show controllers where they are.

Caught between the crossfire of professionals and private airmen, the CAA has moved cautiously. New York City's Idlewild Airport is installing anew $761,000 system that enables ground controllers to keep track of all planes via more and better radio communication between pilot and controllers. Beyond that, CAA is conducting a special radar study at Washington National Airport on the problems of high-density air traffic control.

But for professional airmen, the work is merely patches on patches.

The real need is for a new system.

Though CAAdministrator Lee pleaded --and with reason--that he was hampered by a shortsighted appropriation policy in Congress, many airmen feel that he did not fight hard enough for more funds. Recently, stirred by the criticism, the CAA proposed its own compromise plan for a $916 million expenditure over the next five years.

The system consists of more navigational aids, more airways,, improved radar and radio systems. But, say the Air Force and airlines, the system will still be only semiautomatic--not fast or efficient enough in an age when, two 600 m.p.h. jets close head on so fast that the pilots often never even see each other.

No matter which interim system is adopted, there is little doubt that U.S.

aviation must be closely regulated with a new system of carefully laid out super highways for jets and a network of secondary "roads" set aside for other, slower planes. The alternative is to hamper the growth of aviation and greatly increase the possibility of disaster for those who fly.

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