The Bush administration last week announced measures designed, officials hope, to ease choke points in the nation’s skies as Thanksgiving travelers take to the air.
After record flight delays in the first half of 2007, you can bet passengers also are hoping the Bush plan will work.
The administration will add military air space to East Coast travel routes for a five-day window, beginning Wednesday evening, which will ease congestion — particularly if there is bad weather on the eastern seaboard.
But a good bit of the success — or failure — of these measures depends upon the airlines themselves. Airline executives appeared before Congress recently to say they planned to reduce overbooking over the holiday, and to have additional workers on duty and spare planes standing by if need be.
The public, which has had about enough of chronic delays and canceled flights, will be watching closely to see if the market-based approach that the president has brokered will work.
Airlines will do well to make sure it does, because the next step will be one they surely don’t want: additional government regulation. For instance, if the airlines cannot figure out a way to police themselves and not overbook flights at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, the government will.
At peak times last summer, about 100 flights an hour tried to take off from JFK when that airport more appropriately should be handling about 80, Mary Peters, secretary of transportation, said in a briefing last week.
Many of the fixes for the beleaguered air travel system are focusing on the New York region, since about three-quarters of the flight delays in the country are traceable to problems in that area.
Last week, Bush also talked about long-term plans that his administration is working on to solve air traffic congestion. He hopes that airlines will adopt “congestion pricing,” which ultimately could mean higher costs for travelers flying at peak times. The administration also is proposing new regulations to extend higher cash compensation to stranded airline passengers and ensure those stuck on planes delayed on the tarmac have adequate food, drink and sanitary facilities.
This Thanksgiving travel season will be a test period of sorts for industry and government. It will be illuminating to see if those entities can apply resources to the problem and ensure passengers get what they paid for: safe service that is reasonably on time.
We hope the airlines and the administration realize just how short the public’s patience has become. The situation has festered far too long with no one — Congress, the administration or the airlines — taking the lead. It’s a sad state of affairs when it takes a White House speech to give people a fighting chance to join loved ones for the holiday.
