By Allison Lampert and Doyinsola Oladipo
Sept 15 (Reuters) - Airlines affected by air traffic control staff shortages should do more to prevent delays from snowballing into broader disruptions, a pilots' union and an aviation consultant said, as lawmakers prepared to discuss U.S. sector reforms on Tuesday.
Federal Aviation Administration boss Bryan Bedford is set to testify before a U.S. House appropriations subcommittee about a planned $12.5 billion air traffic control overhaul, a day after a government watchdog warned about spending shortfalls.
Air traffic control-related disruptions have caused flight delays and cancellations in the U.S., Australia and Britain due to staffing shortages and technology issues, posing challenges for airlines around the world.
New York-based airline JetBlue Airways said last week its air traffic-related flight cancellations nearly doubled in the Northeastern U.S. this summer compared to the average of the prior three summers after the region was hit by storms and controller shortages.
According to data from consultancy Cirium, JetBlue's July performance lagged other major U.S. airlines, with an 8.3% cancellation rate compared with less than 3% at rivals including Frontier, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines.
In correspondence reviewed by Reuters, JetBlue's pilots' union, which is currently in contract negotiations with the airline, urged the carrier to take additional steps to prevent flight delays and cancellations from spiraling.
"This summer took a toll with long days, repeated disruptions, and too much seemingly preventable chaos," said a September 7 message from Wayne Scales, president of the JetBlue arm of the Air Line Pilots Association.
Pilots have urged JetBlue to design a plan to prevent operational challenges that left crew waiting for reassignments and hotel accommodations in July, Scales wrote.
"Storms and air traffic constraints will happen; no airline can fully eliminate operational disruptions," he said. "What management can control is how prepared JetBlue is to respond — and how effectively it recovers."
AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL CONSTRAINTS
JetBlue said in a statement it put extensive preparation into its summer operation based on prior years' weather and air traffic control performance, but storms and missing controllers could upset even the best planning.
"The unpredictability of weather and air traffic control constraints makes it significantly harder to plan ahead and can cause disruptions to compound quickly," the carrier said. "This is exacerbated for JetBlue given our outsized footprint in the Northeast."
U.S. airline industry consultant Bob Mann said airlines operating in Northeast airspace — the most congested in the nation — risked delays. He said software was available that could reduce the domino effect of delayed and canceled flights, but it was not widely used by airlines.
Bedford met last Thursday with the CEOs of major U.S. airlines to discuss the FAA's plans to use advanced software to overhaul flight scheduling and improve flight management.
The SMART system, which uses predictive analytics, could more effectively reschedule flights that were canceled due to bad weather.
JetBlue said it was encouraged by the system, "which has the potential to give both the FAA and airlines better information and tools to anticipate constraints earlier, make better operational decisions and recover more effectively when disruptions occur."
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and Doyinsola Oladipo in New York; Editing by Jamie Freed)
