Ben DeCosta On ... (Plus, exclusive audio excerpts from the interview)

Michael J. Pallerino

October 22, 2007

Exclusive audio from our interview:

Ben DeCosta on ...

airport security

a second airport

the terminal redesign

economic growth


Reports that delays are mounting at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport are just another fact of life for Ben DeCosta, aviation general manager for the city of Atlanta and the man who runs the world's busiest air terminal. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report, more than 30 percent of flights in and out of Hartsfield-Jackson were late in August.

Ask DeCosta about it and he's reminded of that old adage that says when you die you'll have to connect through Atlanta to reach the Pearly Gates.

Since taking the job in June 1998, DeCosta has weathered often-criticized airport expansions and delays; devastating terrorist attacks (during which he was sitting on a plane at Hartsfield upon landing when he received news of the 9/11 attacks); wildly unfounded Y2K fears; airline bankruptcies; and reports on a number of rumored consolidations. Today, he's busy overseeing Hartsfield-Jackson's $5.4 billion expansion program.

Business to Business was the first city magazine to interview him shortly after he came to Atlanta. Managing Editor Michael J. Pallerino recently spoke with DeCosta about a wide range of issues and controversies surrounding the metro region's most important economic engine.

Business to Business: Tell us about the Capital Improvement Program.

Ben DeCosta: We're in the middle of one of the nation's biggest active capital improvement and invest programs, more than $6 billion. We've already completed the fifth runway at a cost of $1.2 billion. The international terminal is being redesigned. The consolidated rental car facility will cost in excess of $500 million. In addition, we have lots of airfield improvement projects. Between last September and last November, we replaced one of our runways in 60 days, and that's got to be a record, to replace an entire runway and taxiway in that period of time.

Normally it would take about a year to replace a runway. You close down the runway for construction at 10 p.m. on Friday, work through Saturday and Sunday and reopen it at 4 a.m. on Monday. Then you wait for the next weekend, close it down and open it again, and in the course of nine months to a year you've got it down. We're too busy for that.

We think through what the impacts are going to be on people. Look at the implementation of bag screening. Remember the very large, truck-sized X-ray machines that were in our lobby? We put in an underground system that required us to [basically] do heart surgery on this airport without the patient lying down. We demolished both roads on either side of the terminal; built a building under the road, and then replaced the roadway while never shutting down the operation on either side of the terminal. That required a tremendous amount of planning.

This year, we also added an end-around taxiway. If you're landing to the west on the north side of the airport, instead of waiting to cross the inboard runway, which delays incoming flights and interrupts the outgoing traffic, you can now go around the end of runway, go around the end of the inboard runway and proceed directly to your gate without stopping. This $46 million project is a one of a kind in the nation, an efficiency and safety project that the federal government only recently approved for the Dallas (Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport) terminal. To my knowledge, the only other one is in Germany.

BTB: Why is the new fifth runway considered the most important runway in the nation?

DeCosta: That's a tagline I gave it a few years ago. We recognize we are the nation's busiest airport. Last year we had 976,000 landings and takeoffs; before the new fifth runway, we also were the world's most delayed airport when measured by the aggregate number of delay minutes. This runway cuts the number of delays in half, and helps oil the national transportation system. Delta has the largest hub in the nation, and having an effective airfield means flights leaving and destined for here aren't delayed.

The fifth runway required us to move 20 million cubic yards of fill, and we did it in an environmentally friendly manner, avoiding 5 million truck trips.

BTB: Recent reports have indicated that flight delays are getting worse (more than 30 percent of flights in and out of Hartsfield-Jackson were late in August, according the U.S. Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report, published in early October). What is Hartsfield-Jackson doing to improve these delays?

DeCosta: Traffic has returned to exceed 2001 levels. If you recall, during the summer of 2000, aircraft delays and congestion across America were the subject of congressional hearings. We're back to where we were, and surpassed it because of changes in our industry. We've seen some replacement of some narrow-bodied aircraft with regional jets. This proliferation of regional jets takes up more airport and airspace capacities. If the demand is too great, you end up with passenger delays. This is an industry issue requiring collaboration of airlines and the federal government and airports across the nation. It's going to require well-meaning people to be smart enough to deal with it.

BTB: U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation statistics show Atlanta's airport had one of the fastest rates of international passenger growth in the nation for the first six months of this year among domestic carriers, up 12.5 percent over the same six-month period the year before. Tell us about the new international terminal.

DeCosta: The international terminal is in redesign, and so far it looks like it will be a 12 wide-bodied gate terminal, with 16 gates for off-peak domestic use. This will be just what the airport needs considering Delta has just emerged from bankruptcy and it has a strategy to move its airline to every part of the earth. International growth is the key; it keeps Atlanta as a global city. Our business community finds it very desirous to have access to growth market such as India, Asia and South America, and continue its growth in North America. We'll have traffic in and from every part of the world; Delta has already started reaching into Africa, including Nigeria and Lagos.

BTB: How will the Delta-Shanghai relationship impact the airport?

DeCosta: We're really proud of the Shanghai route. We've entertained a number of Chinese delegations here at the airport over the last year. [Georgia U.S. senators] Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson were very active in convincing the U.S. Department of Transportation to ensure the Southeast had had direct flights to china. Our region was the only part of the nation that had no direct access to China, despite our growth.

BTB: What's more important to Hartsfield-Jackson – commercial travel or cargo?

DeCosta: We are primarily a passenger airport, but we're supplemented by a very healthy cargo component. Our main focus is people but we market the airport to cargo carriers around the world. Two of my staff just came back from an around-the-world journey to meet with cargo carriers as far away as Hong Kong about what we're doing here, to make sure they know how robust our economy is.

BTB: How important is business travel at Hartsfield-Jackson? Any plans for making business travel more convenient?

DeCosta: People think of Atlanta as a major transfer point, going back to the time when the city was a major railroad junction. We have tremendous amounts of connecting traffic, but we're also among the top five destination points in the nation, meaning there are lots of people for whom Atlanta is a destination. It's important to our local economy that we provide a good reach for business and commercial travel as well as those who come here as a destination.

BTB: What's your opinion on regional carriers versus the big boys? And how does it impact them and you?

DeCosta: The regional jets (RJs) became popular when the industry had to find a way to serve the customer better. But when the airline industry's downswing hit, it became a situation where there were too many seats chasing too few passengers. The answer was regional jets – smaller aircraft you could operate more efficiently and profitably.

But at the same time, these smaller aircrafts filled up the airspace, the runways and the gates, which caused congestion and delays. So you must revisit this and see if there is a way to upgrade from the RJs to larger jets, say MD 88s or 737s.

Today, there are many markets served by RJ customers with multiple flights a day that probably could be served by fewer movements with larger aircrafts. The airlines must take a sober look at this, or else the federal government will have to re-regulate that part of the industry.

BTB: There has been some consolidation among airline carriers. What are your thoughts on recent rumors of a merger between Delta and Northwest?

DeCosta: It's hard to say what consolidation would do. Some people thought the proposed marriage between Delta and US Air was great. But when you analyzed it, you saw there were major anti-trust, major anti-competitive forces at work. And then people started to oppose the merger, saying it wasn't fair to the customer. In those instances, fares are going to rise.

With any proposed merger, you have to analyze what the impacts and influences are going to be. In the end, it's how are you going to get from point A to point B? How much are going to pay? And what kind of service are you going to get?

BTB: Some analysts say the North American marketplace is becoming saturated. What's your take?

DeCosta: One of the things that's good for this airport and this region is that Delta is so big. A lot of cities don't have dual hubs. Only Atlanta (Delta and AirTran) and Chicago (American and United) are dual hub cities, so we have built-in competition. Take a city like Pittsburgh; when US Air was there, they owned the place.

You're starting to see some changes. Southwest Air is going into more markets, and the competition means it's a better deal for the American traveler. But at the same time, you don't want to cannibalize a market with too many carriers. That means people are losing money. What you want is strong, profitable airlines that can deliver a solid product at the lowest reasonable cost. This keeps the industry healthy, keeps the economy healthy and you create a fair deal for your employees.

In the end, the employees are the ones who deliver everything. Let's not forget these are people, thousands and thousands of people, who have a social contract, if not an employment contract with their airlines and the American public. And those contracts that were broken over the last half-decade left thousands of people out of work or destroyed retirements because of unwise competition and unwise business decisions.

If we could do some wishful thinking, we would hope our federal government, our private sector and our public sector could make better decisions in that regard. After some of the airlines emerged from bankruptcy, some of those employees had to continue to do first-rate customer service jobs for a lot less money than they were making.

These issues are going to continue to arise, as many of these employees have unions representing them. And these unions will look for their people to do better since their leadership did so well. If you look at Delta, you will see they had great leadership that did a reasonable job of rewarding the people who got the company out of bankruptcy. And they rewarded them in a way that wasn't offensive to the average person. Look at the numbers – their leadership got a lot less than other airlines that came out of bankruptcy.

BTB: There continues to be talks of a second airport. Can you give us a sense of where that stands and what it would mean to Atlanta?

DeCosta: We're going to work with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to develop a scope of work to refine and extend the work they did on their Fact II study (a report that examined the possible need for at least four more commercial airports over the next 30 years. Atlanta was one of several potential sites).

We need to look at the regional airspace and airfield capacity. How do you build enough capacity for the future? Right now, Atlanta is on the list as an area to house a second airport. But there are no guarantees.

I think it was premature for people to say that the answer is a second airport. This is a very complex issue. It's really oversimplified to say there is going to be a second airport and that this [or anywhere] is where it is going to be. My hope is people will relax, be patient and let the facts determine what is in the best interest of our community.

BTB: Walk us through what security is like these days at the airport.

DeCosta: Security is something that's always evolving. Our leadership is the federal government. They are very well coordinated now, something that really came out of 9/11. The CIA, Department of Defense and Homeland Security are the central points of who's responsible for keeping us safe. Airports around the nation are collaborating very well to come up with a system both secure and customer friendly. Sometimes it's a constant struggle to achieve world-class security and world-class customer service. That's still the goal.

Many of us in airport leadership believe security and service go hand in hand. We have to protect our economy by making sure flying at airports around the nation and the world are as hassle-free as we can make them and at the same time people are confident that they are going to arrive safely.

We have a layered system of security. We respond when intelligence tells us there is an increased threat. Right now (at press time), we are in a Code Orange (elevated from a Code Yellow in August 2006). This means we are in a heightened level of vigilance. Right now we have procedures in place for the things we feel may threaten the airport.

BTB: How much influence does Hartsfield-Jackson have?

DeCosta: The Transportation Security Administration is the lead federal agency for airport security. We collaborate with them both locally and nationally. Airports are represented nationally by two organizations: the Airport Council International-North America and the American Association of Airport Executives. Atlanta is affiliated with both organizations. As the manager at Hartsfield-Jackson, I'm on the board of both organizations.

At the local level, when things are implemented, we work with the federal groups to give the traveling public the best of both worlds: security and service.

BTB: What do you do when security level is heightened?

DeCosta: When the conspiracy to use liquids on aircrafts hit, it came all of a sudden. We got the call at midnight, so in three hours we [airports across the country] implemented the plan to protect passengers and the airport. Sometimes the warnings come in advance and other times it's in the middle in the night.

You typically have to be concerned about visibility (so people know what's going on), information, surveillance, new procedures and searches. There are lots of things that we do behind the scene to keep our passengers safe.

BTB: What role does the business community play?

DeCosta: The business community is one of our strengths. Unlike what you may find in other places, when Atlanta goes after something it's a full court press of collaborating entities. Take Mayor (Shirley) Franklin's trip to China, where people from academia, the Metro Atlanta Chamber, Delta and a range of representatives from Fortune 500 companies all sang from the same song book. They wanted to secure direct flights to Shanghai and get a Chinese consulate here. It was a unified front. And that's something that Atlanta is really blessed with, something that you won't find anyplace else.