Minimal Thanksgiving Delays, but Don't be Lulled Into Complacency

I’ve been getting updates over the last couple days from Travelocity’s Window Seat blog, and it appears that flying has been a pretty easy event for this season’s holiday travel so far. Part of it is that there are fewer airplanes in the air and part of it is probably that the weather was relatively calm, but don’t worry, this isn’t becoming a consumer blog. It’s a request to our government to not start feeling complacent about the stress-free skies. We need air traffic control reform even if it’s not necessary this moment.

We’ve seen this before. The amount of traffic builds so much that the air travel system hits a breaking point. Just when it seems that something has to change, demand goes down and all is good again. We saw this after September 11, and that was a perfect opportunity to fix the system that was squandered.

In recent years we’ve seen the system become stressed once again, but now we have again seen a drop in demand. This one could be longer and uglier than in the past, but there’s one thing we know. One of these days, traffic will rebound. This just gives us the slack we needed to run an efficient system while still addressing congestion issues we know will return.

So let’s hope that the incoming Congress and Department of Transportation team will realize that we need to get a new air traffic control system using current technology, and we shouldn’t continue putting it off. The time is right.

Happy Thanksgiving.