Washington Insights: Travel Turmoil

A Trade-off Worth Making

Washington won't fix it. Washington hasn't "fixed" anything this year!

We have to do it ourselves.

How? By trading a little convenience for a more manageable travel experience with fewer planes in the air and greater assurance that your flight will leave and arrive on time. If consumers continue to demand 17 different flights to go dig into some of Grandma's home cooking, the problem will only get worse.

The truth is this country could live without bigger airports and new planes the size of Rhode Island. If this craze of "more and bigger is better" continues, more flights will fly over homes, airlines will continue to pack in passengers like sardines, and travel will continue to be a frustrating and unpleasant experience.

Unless we rise up and say, "Enough is enough!" our travel situation will only get worse.

Instead of continuing to fiddle while the airports burn and travelers fume, Washington needs to appropriate some of our hard-earned tax money (instead of funding things like the Lawrence Welk Museum, bridges to nowhere, and a myriad of "pork" projects) to training more air traffic controllers and upgrading their equipment, which is almost as old as Senator Robert Byrd and badly in need of revitalization. Washington also needs to free up air space currently reserved for military use. With those two important steps, we could at least get headed in the right direction to fix a malfunctioning air travel system.

We are not asking Congress to take a pay cut (that would be totally unrealistic). What we are asking is ... just for a minute, Congress ... step down from your ivory towers, get in the air travel trenches with us, and fix it!

In the meantime ... we'll be circling the airport, not so patiently waiting for landing instructions, and, if we are really lucky, getting to a gate so we can get off this plane and out of this mess within an hour of finally landing.

Have you had a terrible travel experience? Chances are you have. We'd like to hear about it. Click here to email us your story. We'll post some of your responses here on Dolans.com. In the meantime, you have rights as a passenger! Make sure you know them. Click here to listen to our audio alert with all of the details.