EDITORIAL: Air travel system too bumpy in metro area

Thanksgiving travelers queuing up at area airports this week probably won't much like what awaits. Terminals will be crowded, security lines long, a lot of flights delayed. And this year, for the first time, some of the 1.3 million people expected to flood the area's three major airports will be confronted with a distasteful choice between immodest options - a revealing, full-body scan or an intimate, full-body pat-down.

The need for tight security is an unfortunate fact of life in the age of terrorism. Travelers may just have to get used to escalating indignity. It's a price we pay for safety.

But officials can, and must, do something about nation-topping percentages of delayed flights at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports that have persisted courtesy of the glacial pace of improvements in handling the area's air traffic. While the immediate options aren't great, long range answers are promising.

In the short term, we will have to live with delays sure to increase as the economy improves, or with the burden of fewer scheduled flights and, likely, higher fares.

Given that choice, the lesser evil is fewer flights. Delays in New York ripple across the nation. The inconvenience of fewer flights here should pay off in fewer delays here and nationally. Consider it our gift to America's air travelers.

But capping flights is an imperfect, back-to-the future fix.

Flights at LaGuardia, Newark and Kennedy were capped in the 1970s to reduce delays. When the caps were phased out from 2000 to 2007, fares dropped and service was expanded. But in 2007 four in 10 arriving flights were either delayed or canceled. So caps were reimposed in 2008, but at 2007 operating levels. Delays declined to three in 10 flights, but are expected to rise as the economy recovers. Tighter caps should prevent that, but it's a fix that needs to be temporary.

Ideally, the capacity of this area's busy, small, densely occupied airspace should be increased, not restricted.

That means completing the job of remapping the region's airspace to maximize its efficient use. The remapping began in 1998. It has gone slowly, in part, because of neighborhood opposition to rerouted planes. Federal Aviation Administration officials say it will be completed in 2012. Fourteen years is too long. The agency needs to meet that deadline.

Longer term, the solution is deployment of the satellite-based NextGen air traffic control technology, now targeted for 2018. That system would replace antiquated radar-based air traffic control and provide more precise information to controllers and pilots. As a result, planes would be able to safely fly closer to one another and take off and land with less separation in time and space. Think of it as creating more traffic lanes in the sky.

Washington should do and pay whatever it takes to speed deployment. It's just the kind of infrastructure modernization the economy needs, and it would make the lives of herded, threatened, scanned and patted air travelers a bit easier. hN