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With deregulation and mergers, the airlines have eliminated routes and implemented a hub and spoke system that requires synchronizing the arrival and departure times to very close tolerances. One delay can throw the whole system off and cause gridlock. The heck with passenger convenience. The system is designed to wring nickel and dime extra profit for the airlines.
To understand the problem, at many airports that are not major hubs like Chicago's O'Hare, you would see airliners stacked waiting to land or take off at certain times of the day, say at 9:00AM. Then for two hours or so, only an occasional freight hauler would land or take off. The problem is scheduling a bunch of airlines for the same few minutes. There is no reason to expand airports as there is little usage between scheduled flights. Better scheduling practices would solve the problem and reduce delays.
Then there is the hassle at the airports due to the keystone kops security system. Add to this, the airlines are now outsourcing airliner maintenance to Latin America and Asia where labor is cheap and they avoid scrutiny in maintenance practices by the FAA, which has no jurisdiction there.
Finally, the airlines are promoting regulatory policies (what little public interest policy is left) to essentially privatize the FAA. The airlines are pushing legislation in Congress, of particular interest is Senate bill S.1300, which would give the FAA the authority to "legislate" user fees on general aviation (non-airline) airplanes. Since setting taxes is supposed to be reserved to Congress, this would give "the power to tax is the power to destroy" capability to the FAA. Then by seeing to it that the head of the FAA is run by someone from the airline industry, the airlines could tax their only competition, commercial general aviation out of existence. The fact that this would eliminate many small charter companies, thousands of support businesses, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and flying service to many small towns not now serviced by airlines, is of little concern to the airline executives whose only goal is to maximize profits for their (mismanaged) companies.
Another method being used to "privatize" FAA responsibilities is by outsourcing traditional FAA operations to private corporations. (IIRC, one such company is your favorite military/industrial company Lockheed Martin.)
For all these reasons, I prefer to drive or take a train. I recently took a train trip of about 400 miles and found it quite pleasant. I was traveling alone and, since I had no one with me to share the driving, I found the train trip less stressful than driving the entire 400 miles by myself.
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