To the Editor:
Back in June of 1992 my company, LMR Systems Inc., asked the Federal Communications Commission’s permission to build private land mobile radio systems at 16 of the nation’s busiest airports. Six years later, we’re still waiting for the FCC’s OK, and the traveling public is waiting as well for the added safety and security LMR’s Airport Safety Communications Project can provide.
It’s time, I submit, for the FCC to get off the dime. Our Airport Safety Communications Project’s major function would be to guarantee that an integrated radio dispatch system always will be available in its entirety should an emergency arise. But day in and day out while LMR’s applications languish, the thousands of businesses that would rely on ASCP to conduct their airport operations also are deprived of the improved efficiency our systems can offer.
Of course, those six years have not been a dead loss, in the sense that LMR Systems has defended its applications in public dialogues with the commission, its staff and interested parties. These exchanges have led us to refine our proposals so as to eliminate the need for waivers, and to make sure that commercial ASCP service is restricted to private organizations operating at each of the 16 airports.
Those six years also have seen a major shift in the philosophy governing policy making at the FCC. LMR’s applications, I further submit, have run afoul of one of the most visible and politically popular changes-auctioning off spectrum. Because the FCC now sees dollar signs on spectrum, it appears reluctant to grant applications like ours. But the justification, if any, for auctioning of the geographically tightly delimited frequencies ASCP would employ is far from obvious.
LMR Systems would build dispatch stations broadcasting at a maximum radius of four miles. These would carry voice transmissions of any business or public agency operating at say, New York’s Kennedy Airport, just to the outer boundaries of the airport. ASCP would use 900 MHz channels, all of which have been frequency-coordinated with the other spectrum users in the vicinities of the 16 airports.
That leaves vast reaches in all of the 16 metropolitan areas for the highly auctionable frequencies available to specialized mobile radio providers. These providers, however, are not likely to relieve the shortage of mobile radio facilities afflicting U.S. airports. Aeronautical Radio Inc., a creature of the larger airlines that supplies some ground radio dispatch service, has told the FCC that “commercial service vendors prefer to cater to the wide-area, low-intensity uses of communications. They have been unable, or unwilling, to provide the type of airport coverage necessary or to accommodate the levels of communications intensity encountered on the airports.”
There’s little prospect of a rich auction of frequencies restricted to airport acreage, in other words, which makes waiting for an auction a poor reason to delay ASCP’s licenses further.
More importantly, the delay in processing our applications has deprived the public for six years now of upgraded safety and security at airports that millions of travelers use each year. The Air Florida tragedy several years ago, within sight of Washington’s Reagan National Airport, demonstrated by a paralyzing gridlock in public-safety radio communications the need for a preprogrammed, priority-based emergency dispatch network-precisely what ASCP can and will provide, once its applications are granted.
That concatenation of events-rush hour, a snowstorm, the aircraft plunging into an icy river-hopefully will never recur. Nevertheless, statistics tell us that 68.2 percent of all aircraft accidents take place on or near airports: on the ground, during takeoff and landing, or during initial climb or final approach. In an emergency, an up-and-running ASCP would enable airport authorities to pre-empt its dedicated frequencies and conduct a triage operation for the fire, rescue and police services most urgently needed, as well as coordinate the normal business of the airport-passengers claiming baggage, renting cars, catching parking shuttles, checking in for flights-that would still need tending to.
During the pendency of its applications, the frequencies we asked for have gone to waste, unused by anyone for anything. The public may receive some small monetary gain at some future date if those area-limited frequencies are ever auctioned. But the public would benefit immediately and concretely if those frequencies were more than dead air, if they were employed in transmitting the routine messages of all the businesses that make air travel possible and tolerable, and enabling airport authorities to deploy emergency resources without delay.
Congress created the FCC to assign those and all other frequencies in a manner best serving “the public interest, convenience and necessity.” It’s time the commission applied that standard to the Airport Safety Communications Project-before the tragedy of another major airline accident is exacerbated by lack of adequate communications.
Donald W. Goodwin
President
LMR Systems Inc.
Edgewater, Md.
