(01-31-2018 11:57 AM)Claw Wrote: I think a gas tax hike is probably needed as well.
What I would like to see is something to reverse the mega-hub practice in the passenger airline industry. I have absolutely no idea how to accomplish that from a regulatory standpoint. However, we are becoming weaker as a nation and economy due to this practice.
Decades ago we had many more airline hubs. This gave us bigger, better equipped airports at many more locations around the country. As we stand now, the bulk of the industries technical and mechanical expertise is being concentrated into fewer and fewer locations. This is bad for growth and bad for the dissemination of technical capacity across the country.
From a national defense standpoint, we are now at the point where striking ten or fewer selected airports could effectively shutdown passenger air travel across the country.
I'd like to see municipal airports roar back to life and flying become tolerable again.
Trump was right, some of us Americans are dreamers. I dream of comfortable direct flights.
What's interesting about airlines is how the scheduling model varies across the major carriers; most of them like United and American use the hub and spoke system as you note, in which flights arrive and leave hub airports all around the same time like a movie theater where everything starts within an hour of each other but is dead for an hour and a half in between. Middle-tier flights from the likes of Southwest (who I almost always fly with) and JetBlue use a lot of focus cities and keep flights coming and going at a pretty regular frequency, making them a lot less susceptible to delays at major airports. They're keeping a lot of airports (like St. Louis) from really falling off just because their P&L often can't stomach the landing fees somewhere like O'Hare so they use Midway instead.
Southwest also engages in a hub and spoke model for a number of their flights. From where I live, you can't fly to St. Louis direct anymore (change planes at Midway). Midway is pretty much a hub for a large percentage of the flights Southwest has anymore. I haven't had to fly much within the past year, but Delta seems to have really stepped it up and IMHO is better than Southwest in efficiency on a number of flights that I noticed between 1 to 2 years ago.
With the advent of smaller but longer ranged planes like the Dreamliner and 737 Max, There should be an increase in direct flight from smaller airports in the future.
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new infrastructure plan
