greggwiggins

An item extracted from The Washington Post's somewhat irreverent "Campaign Slog", an irregular Style section feature about the 2008 presidential race.

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Mike Huckabee showed up for his NRA speech wearing jeans and cowboy boots. "I'm not trying to be cool . . . I've been on Delta," which he said stands for "Didn't Even Leave the Airport." Turns out the former Arkansas governor had one flight canceled and two flights delayed and had no time to change.

We asked him yesterday how many canceled or delayed flights he's experienced. He ticked off 10 cities before saying it might be easier to name ones where he hasn't been stranded. Huckabee pledged his first act as president would be "to fix the air traffic control system in the country."

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JohnWM

If only ALL the presidential candidates could experience miserable air travel! Perhaps then the new president might be motivated to fix this broken system we are stuck with.

Spiff

Other than the TSA, how is it 'broken'?

Palal

The ATC doesn't have the capacity to grow..... airports like JFK and ORD are overused, and delays are an everyday event. Airspace needs to be controlled more precisely to increase capacity.

ralfp

The 'system' allows airlines to schedule more flights than ATC can handle, and then blame the resulting delays on ATC ("It's beyond our control."). To me that's a broken system.

bhmlurker

Huckabee needs to learn to travel with roll-aboard and change while plane is delayed in airport or in-flight restroom. Also hire some staffers who knows to get him on alternate flights when there's delays/cancellations.

I doubt any president in the near future is going to fix anything airline-related. Where's the incentive when there's no economic benefit to the president, his/her political party, or the federal gov't coffer.

Human Unit 763246B

Changing clothes takes less than 5 minutes.

Congressmen fly commercial often. They could try to fix the problem. Part of the problem is fixable but only to a point.

Having a president who has flown commercial, been delayed, drives a car, been stuck in traffic, ran their own small business, did their own tax returns, and other stuff in daily life would be nice.

Grog

So anyone in this situation (businesspeople or leisure travelers) have to suffer or hire more staffers...doesn't quite hold water.

top987

Please make the TSA do something constructive for security instead of for show.

Please make he TSA responsible for the security of the airports, not the luggage police for the airlines.

Please make the TSA more operational and less bureaucratic.

Please make the TSA stop with the stupid restrictions on clothing/gels/liquids/etc. and start patrolling the airports to gather intelligence.

Thank You......

bocastephen

The ATC system, although antiquated, is as much to blame as the airlines themselves who exchanged capacity for frequency and overloaded the skies with excess aircraft.

Before we start collectively throwing darts at the FAA, let's ask the airlines what impact they think they had by exchanging 3 daily 757s or D10s for 2 737s and 6 RJs.

Sometimes 'what the customer wants' is not what's best for everyone. I don't want to go back to the days of the CAB regulating who flies what and where, but as part of a holistic approach to thinning out our traffic problem, I'd like to see, as a start, a voluntary pullback on regional jet service to cities served by mainline aircraft and some attempt at modifying aircraft utilization to reduce frequency in exchange for capacity. Perhaps the government could offer some incentive to airlines who combine two or more flights into one - so the one remaining flight on larger metal would get some preferential tax treatment on its fuel.

3Cforme

The opposite coin of an incentive is a tax, and funds raised from the tax could be used to improve technology and capacity of the ATC.

Alternately, the government could establish an auction for available take-off and landing slots at congested airports. Just room for 50 planes per hour at Newark? Then sell only 50 slots. Does that capacity get reduced to 35 in 'bad' weather? Sell 35 all-weather slots and 15 available-weather slots, and when the FAA needs to reduce traffic in poor visibility, those 15 available-weather slots are the first to go.

The President gets Air Force One and Secret Service motorcades - all pathways are cleared. Traffic congestion is absolutely the last thing on his mind.

Huckabee can slam Delta, but delays happen every day on every major airline. Whining isn't going to fix it.

Timothy in MN

The only really effective way to improve capacity at an airport is to build another runway. The average runway can handle ~40 operations/hr. Better air traffic control spacing on arrivals and departures might gain a 10% improvement. (~4 operations). Build another runway that doesn't conflict with the existing runways and you add 30-40 operations an hour. That's adding capacity. Unfortunately most large airports with scheduled service tend to be land locked and can't do that.

bocastephen

If the FAA decides to clamp down on the slot system and allow only as many scheduled ops into an airport as they are equipped to handle, the airlines might start screaming "CAB" and complain the government is 'regulating' their commercial operations.

The airlines tend to blame everyone but themselves for this mess - first the FAA, and now they blame GA (targeting the 'fat cat' corporate jets to gain public support). I'd like to see an airline executive stand up and admit their transition from low frequency/high capacity to high frequency/low capacity is a significant contributing factor to the current problem - even if that change was market-force driven.

The airlines need to contribute to the solution just as much as the FAA needs to modernize their systems. We should not be building more airports and runways until we're using our existing space and capacity more efficiently.

bhmlurker

We don't need to build more runways and airport, that's spending tax money so airlines can continue to operate as they wish. Doing so would be akin to poor urban planning in many US cities; widen highway but let suburban sprawl grow unchecked. Create capacity and it'll be filled asap, though rarely efficiently.

3Cforme has it right. Enforce low # of slots and airlines will use the equiv of mass transit, i.e. short-medium range high capacity planes such as A300. Drop the # of flights per day. There's no reason to fly countless CRJ between major cities such as BOS, PHL, IAD, and JFK, other than to claim 1 flight per hour. the end result is congestion and endless whining by passengers of cramped CRJ seats, lack of overhead bin space, and low # of F seats for upgrades.

For the cities served by 1 CRJ per day, they can keep those.

djlndc

bocastephen, you hit the nail on the head. Airlines at LGA fly smaller regional jets instead of larger aircraft just to maintain their slots and keep out competition. Congress needs to allow some of these legacy carrier to go bust or merge. It pi$$es me off when I hear the airlines blame general aviation for clogging the airspace. If that was the case, I'd be getting the same priority when I'm trying to enter the DC ADIZ in my 172 as a 777 coming in to land at IAD.