IMHO In My Humble Opinion

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Mary Peters (the secretary of transportation), wrote about allowing airports to charge whatever they want for slots to use the runways.

I'm skeptical whenever I hear the current administration suggest any sort of deregulation... We had deregulation in California and Texas in the energy markets. California's problems caused enough turmoil to get the governor replaced, and Texas now has some of the biggest price increases in the country.

Moving to an auction-based system of charging more for high-traffic times makes some theoretical sense. But rather than giving airports an incentive to increase the number of flights going out and make things happen smoothly, it gives a perverse incentive to constrain supply to drive the prices up. When one aspect of the air traffic problem is that much of the air traffic control system is antiquated and unable to handle the load, what we really need is a solution that incentivizes upgrading that system. If I honestly believed that such an auction system for runway slots would reduce any prices, I might be in favor, but I suspect that it's only going to cause ticket prices to increase.

I fly a lot. The fact that so many of the flights I've been on in the last couple of years due to air traffic control delays is mind-boggling to me. And the fact that such delays, in many cases, only get announced when the flight was originally scheduled to take off, is yet another aspect of air travel that makes it even worse today.

A few years ago, I signed up for a service from United Airlines to send me messages when a flight I was on wasn't on time. I got a few messages that actually told me, far enough in advance that I wasn't already headed to the airport, that my flight was delayed and I could delay my trip to the airport and still make my flight. Shouldn't our air traffic control system give this a degree of predictability?