Must be the Fox TV people are getting irritated by delays, canceled flights, lost luggage, cattle car seating and taking off of shoes. They had a guy on Fox News this morning ranting that all could be fixed by some miraculous but unnamed technological improvement that the FAA was supposed to do but had not.
Not true. The congestion, delays, and cancellations are caused by too many aircraft trying the operate out of too few airports. The only fix is to bring more airports into service. Right now the bulk of commercial traffic goes thru 35 hub airports which is too many airplanes. An airport can only safely operate about one flight per minute, and no amount of technology can do much about it. It is very dangerous to allow the following flight to touch down before the proceeding flight has cleared the runway. Likewise it is dangerous to allow the following flight to release brakes before the proceeding flight is airborne.
The solution is to bring more airports into service. In New England airports in Providence Rhode Island and Manchester New Hampshire take a good deal of traffic that used to go to Boston. Which is one reason Boston is not on the FAA's list of overloaded airports.
2 comments:
Rockford is trying to do that for O'Hare. It is being politically stymied.
Ahh yes. The NIMBY problem. No one wants an airport near their place, too noisy and too much traffic. Here in New England we had a couple of smaller, wanting to grow, cities that already had airports and who wanted to increase traffic thereto. Southwest Airlines wanted a lower cost, lower delay, airport and so now Manchester NH has better air connections with Baltimore than Logan does.
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