Let's have our cake and eat it too

Whenever a business does something that is inconvenient for its customers or employees, the public seems to believe there is no other reason for it rather than greed and/or general malice, and politicians seem to share that belief. The new bill imposing high fines on airlines that keep passengers waiting on the tarmac for more than three hours is evidence of this fact. Apparently, the bill writers believe that the airlines do this sort of thing just to be mean to passengers.

Whenever something happens that causes lines to form on the runway, no one really knows beforehand exactly how long it would take for a taxiing aircraft to take off. The reason that overly long tarmac waits have been happening is because airlines would risk keeping some flights on the runway in the hopes that they could take off in some reasonable amount of time, and sometimes the risk would't pay off and the aircraft would be stranded on the runway for a time long enough to warrant cancelling the flight. Imposing prohibitively high fines ($27,000 per passenger) for taking those risks will mean that, when things get crowded, airlines will simply cancel more flights. Because it doesn't look like overall air traffic will get less intense any time soon, we'll see much more cancellations happening whenever weather gets bad. And then, perhaps, politicians will start talking about the need for legislation forbidding airlines to cancel flights.

It's also astonishing that one of the most important culprit of the air traffic congestion is not facing any outrage or negative publicity. That culprit is the FAA: the government. One of the biggest reasons that air traffic is so overcrowded is the fact that the FAA uses an ancient radar system: it's over 40 years old and cannot possibly deal with current air traffic volumes. But no, it's all the fault of the greedy airlines who keep you waiting on the tarmac just because they can.