WASHINGTON – Two West Coast senators are leading an effort to increase the number of cross-country flights out of Reagan National Airport, a move that could lead to more noise over neighborhoods and jam already filled parking lots.
Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., have amended a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill to allow up to 20 additional takeoffs and landings a day.
Airport officials say National can’t handle more flights, and neighbors say they don’t want more low-flying jets overhead.
The senators “want the convenience of going to National Airport rather than trucking out to Dulles,” said U.S. Rep. James Moran Jr., D-Va., whose district includes National and who opposes more flights. “But that’s just my speculation. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. But this would not be the first time a senator passed national policy based on their personal convenience.”
Moran said that the effort to add flights has a good chance of succeeding, because similar proposals have been passed twice before.
The full Senate will consider the bill in the next two months. There is no bill in the House.
Destinations for new long-distance flights, which would be determined by the U.S. Department of Transportation, have not been chosen. But the bill mandates that 12 of the flights would go to the Western United States.
“It’s about connecting West and East Coast economic centers,” said R.C. Hammond, spokesman for Smith, elaborating on the senator’s motivation for the amendment.
There are two nonstop flights to Cantwell’s home state of Washington from National but none to Smith’s.
Because of National’s relatively small size and past problems with delays and congestion, in 1969 the FAA placed caps on arrivals and departures. For decades, flights out of National were also restricted to distances of no more than 1,250 miles.
“We have no vacant gates, no vacant ticket counters, and we are filling up all of our parking facilities,” said James Bennett, chief executive of the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority, which runs National and Dulles International Airport. He said 20 flights a day “may not seem like a lot, but that’s potentially like 300,000-some more passengers a year.”
Some seem resigned to having more Boeing 737s overhead. “What Congress wants, Congress gets,” said Mat Thorp of the Palisades Citizens Association in Washington.
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