... To ease crowded skies that spread delays. Summary of story is here: http://65.36.138.212/publicus/blog/read.asp?BlogID=8

I heard about this on the news last night. They said that the number of flights will be the same, but they will be more evenly spread out over the day rather than bunched up during the most busy times.

Most of the much-ballyhooed "congestion" is caused by the airlines themselves. If the tower can handle only 80 operations per hour and the carriers have 120 flights with ETAs at the same time, something has to give. No carrier wants to have the last scheduled departure/arrival.

Root of the problem is not airspace or scheduling, it is lack of runways. No one wants their local airport to build a new runway or extend an existing runway, and heaven forbid that anyone build a whole new airport. Seattle-Tacoma's third runway will go into service in 2008, I believe, and it has been 20 years in the making after zillions of dollars were spent in legal battles.

Keep the govt out. Having some beaurocrat decide airport matters will add corruption and inefficieny.

More than once flying out of either Ft. Lauderdale or Miami to LGA, I was somewhat surprised as we sat on the ground not taking off. The pilot came on the air and said we were "waiting for a confirmed arrival slot at LGA. Until we have that we can't take off". Now I understand that if a flight is delayed that might be necessary, but it seems downright foolish that if the flight is taking off on time as scheduled there isn't already a confirmed slot for them to land on time at the other end! But of course, it isn't possible when they have more flights scheduled to land than possibly can!