Mark– That report is indeed remarkably readable. It looks like the airports with the largest throughput (the big hubs) are the ones in most dire need of additional capacity, with the NY area under under immediate stress. The report doesn’t explicitly say what non-physical constraints exist, but I imagine zoning, NIMBY, and other “business” constraints tend to get in the way. (When I lived one town away from Bedford, MA, most residents were dead set against Hanscom Field expanding its commercial flights because of noise worries. I would have been delighted to avoid the Logan trek! Gotta say I love my new home base of SeaTac.)

Sadly, the top result in searching for that silly airline ad is now this post. I was sure I’d unearthed it on YouTube or similar sometime in the last year. Sigh.

I’m a 650-hour instrument-rated private pilot who flies a lot in busy airspace (eastern Canada and the NE U.S.), and I can confirm that Eric’s right — ATC handles the enroute traffic fine (and traffic into smaller airports), even with their stale technology. The problem is almost 100% lack of runway space at busy hubs combined with irresponsible scheduling that makes no allowance for airport capacity or even the slightest weather problems.

The airlines deliberately overschedule flights into the busy hubs so that they’ll look like they have better service. There’s no incentive for any one airline to act responsibly, because its competitors will still overschedule and will look like they have better service, even if they end up canceling a lot of the flights in the end.

“An Analysis of Airports and Metropolitan Area Demand and Operational Capacity in the Future” 2007-2025. 23 pages + appendcies

http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf

You’re not going to alleviate that with technology.

Jarvis has some additional suggestions, though, that get the customers in on the act — making them more active participants both within the airline process and with their fellow passengers.

(I never saw those Kirk-and-Spock ads the first time around — they’re wonderful!)

Now I, a consumer, can see every open seat on a plane. I can check fares for multiple airlines, at multiple departure times, on multiple days.

From the airline perspective, revenue management is much easier with the MIPS, TPS, and other quanta of computing afforded by Moore’s law. So are irregular operations, the dreaded term which signifies the snowstorm in Chicago has throw the regular schedule over the proverbial rail.

Up front, digital text messages have replaced many required radio transmissions. Computer optimized routings make the wind your friend when traveling east, and less you enemy when traveling west. LCD screens present the information a pilot used to have to get from dozens of gauges and dials. Even the terrain below is presented via a database. And the thousands of pages of paper charts are now replaced with a flash disk in what is called an “Electronic Flight Bag”.

Sure, we don’t feel the difference. But image what it would be like if the number of people flying today were flying in 1970? It is sort of like how Moore’s law has given us the wonders of automated voice attendants, and how Gilder’s law has given human customer service agents a distinctly Hindi accent.

In other words, it is indeed Moore’s law which has allowed a very crowded, but very cheap airline travel system to happen.

“Why does that look familiar?”
“Because we’ve been there”

http://www.livevideo.com/video/975988600D5642EA967949DA650EFD62/1986-western-airlines-commerci.aspx