Bush Announces Plan to ease Holiday Air Traffic Delays
[Guest post by DRJ]
With the busiest air travel days of the year just around the corner, President Bush announced a plan to ease holiday delays:
“Ahead of the holiday travel crunch, President Bush ordered steps Thursday to reduce air traffic congestion and long delays that have left passengers stranded.
The most significant change is that the Pentagon will open unused military airspace from Florida to Maine to create “a Thanksgiving express lane” for commercial airliners. It will be open next week for five days — Wednesday through Sunday — for the busiest days of Thanksgiving travel. Officials said the chief benefit would be to speed takeoffs from New York airports, particularly during bad weather.
Bush called holiday travel “a season of dread for too many Americans.” He said the problems with delayed flights are “clear to anybody who’s been traveling. Airports are very crowded. Travelers are being stranded and flights are delayed, sometimes with a full load of passengers sitting on the runway for hours.
“These failures carry some real costs for the country, not just in the inconvenience they cause but in the business they obstruct and the family gatherings they cause people to miss,’ the president said. “We can do better.”
The new plan also will be in effect for the Christmas travel season. “
I suspect this is more Katrina fall-out to the extent the Bush Administration is trying to anticipate and pre-emptively deal with problems. Good. Now we need the grocery and retail stores to open a few more holiday express lanes.
— DRJ
Thankfully I’m driving this year. Leaving tomorrow for the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.
aunursa (1b5bad) — 11/15/2007 @ 1:07 pmWhat we need is more runways, more planes, and less stupidity from airline company executives.
chaos (9c54c6) — 11/15/2007 @ 1:08 pmWhat about the West Coast? And what about the Kwanzaa traffic? Typical Bush! Here’s clearly a East Coast loving, anti-African-Amierican bigot.
I question the timing. Obviously SOMETHING is going down.
Tongue is firmly in cheek.
Viktor (6c107f) — 11/15/2007 @ 1:53 pmAnd what does the administration plan to do about those inevitable winter storms that shut down half the airports in the country as a cold front makes it way from Manitoba to the East Coast? Send FEMA supplies to the people stranded on the runways?
I have read that Thanksgiving and Christmas themselves are actually the days in the year with the lightest traffic, and if your family arrangements are flexible enough, it behoves the savvy traveller to fly on those days.
As for the last line of your post–the only thing that will ever improve the shopping experience is fellow customers who don’t act like idiots. I speak from experience–this will be my seventeenth Christmas in retail, and every year it gets worse. Last year, we opened at 5 AM, and as I drove to work I passed Best Buy, to see people fighting for parking places there at 4:45 AM! This year we will open at 4AM. And there will be people (not a mob, but enough to justify the early opening) standing in line at 3:45 AM waiting to get in. (But I get to be relatively lazy this year: I have a middle shift, which equates to being there at 8AM.) And come late December, we will be open past 11 PM for the convenience of those who somehow couldn’t find time earlier in the day (earlier starting at 8AM) to come in and shop. (And they will have their kids with them at that late hour. Not big kids, either. Four and five year olds.)
By Christmas Eve, I inevitably decide that Scrooge wimped out, and should never have changed his opinion about Christmas.
kishnevi (9992c6) — 11/15/2007 @ 2:10 pmThe high traffic is from the people traveling to and from holiday gatherings, so yes, the actual travel on Thanksgiving and Christmas is light.
The winter storm mitigation plan is Global Warming, don’tcha know?
LarryD (feb78b) — 11/15/2007 @ 2:55 pmBan all carry on items for the week of Thnaksgiving and Christmas.
Minturn (2a8465) — 11/15/2007 @ 3:51 pmFox News had a segment on this that said freeing up New York air traffic would affect at least 2/3 of the country because of the ripple effect.
And Kishnevi, I sympathize with you and everyone who works in retail this time of year.
DRJ (8b9d41) — 11/15/2007 @ 4:06 pmWhat about the West Coast?
Skys are for the most part, open corridor.
And what about the Kwanzaa traffic?
What traffic? As much is created by a Vegas convention for any org sans NOW! No offense intended to anyone.
TC (1cf350) — 11/16/2007 @ 1:13 am