Can Capitalism Reduce Flights And Delays At LaGuardia?
There are 26,000 airline flights a day in the United States, and sometimes it seems as if every last one of them flies into La Guardia Airport. In fact, only about a thousand of them do on any given day, but that can be enough to create waits of an hour or two to take off or land, and that, in turn, delays air traffic around the country. So over the next few months, the government plans to reduce the number of flights at La Guardia permanently, using a method almost unheard of in air traffic control: capitalism. There could be some problems on the way, however, as a free-market solution promises to yield a free-for-all. The parties involved agree, though, that the old system has broken down. For decades traffic was kept bearable by a rationing system, based on incumbency, with airlines claiming flights the way Columbus claimed America for Ferdinand and Isabella: they got there first. A second way to add a flight at La Guardia was to persuade Congress or the Federal Aviation Administrat
