I hate the concept of regulation of competition, but I think you can regulate the operating capacity of an airport terminal to equal the cacpacity of the airport's runways. My solution is like taking a meat cleaver to the airlines.

If you want to stop a driver from taking a particular road to work and at least try a different road, wouldn't the fastest way be to just randomly start pulling vehicles over to the side of the road? I'm making the number up, but if only 220 flights can take off in an hour from O'Hare, then for God's sake the ATC should not let more than 220 pretend to take off.

We know the actual numbers, it's not like airports are a new concept. Use statistics to find out actual maximum **undelayed** capacity by day of week by month (e.g. "Tuesdays in March"). 88 takeoffs that are all 30 minutes late doesn't count.

If there are too many flights scheduled, then at 2am each day, the FAA randomly cancels flights at that airport for overscheduled hours. Each airline gets 1 flight per hour per takeoff runway that they can protect. After that, it's a lottery drawing, with results posted at the FAA's web site like Powerball results so it's harder for airlines to jerk around their customers.

To make things interesting, flights to cities where that airline has service within 2 hours on either side of the flight get double chances of getting a random flight on that airline cancelled, within 1 hour, tripled. So if UA wants to schedule semi-hourly LAX-SFO service, they're just increasing the odds that their SFO-NRT flight is going to bite the dust.

Pretty soon, carriers will find ways to stop serving hubs that are over-crowded. Purely random cancellations will wreck havoc in the airlines crew and maintenance schedules and airlines will need start to schedule rationally. Meanwhile, smaller entrants still get guaranteed departures each hour if they can afford the gate space.

Just a wacky idea...