Airlines want more air space to reduce delays

There's a 95 percent chance Senior Editor Christine Sarkis is thinking about travel right now. Follow her on Instagram @postcartography and Twitter @ChristineSarkis.

Christine Sarkis is an SATW-award-winning journalist and executive editor at SmarterTravel. Her stories have also appeared on USA Today, Conde Nast Traveler, Huffington Post, and Business Insider. Her advice has been featured in dozens of print and online publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and People magazine. She has also shared travel tips on television and radio shows including Good Morning America, Marketplace, and Here & Now. Her work has been published in the anthologies Spain from a Backpack and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. She is currently working on a travel memoir.

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Just before Thanksgiving, I covered the holiday express lanes, those air corridors along the eastern seaboard, normally reserved for military use, that the government opened for commercial traffic to minimize holiday flight delays. Well guess what? It worked so well that the airline industry wants more.

According to this Bloomberg.com article, “carriers want access to the corridor during ‘extreme delays’ and at holidays and peak-travel periods.”

If occasional use of the corridors is feasible, I think it’s a great idea. Just yesterday I was researching flight delays in 2007, and the stuff I found was enough to make even the most dedicated frequent flyer want to take the train. For instance, in the first part of the year, nearly a third of all flights were delayed. And, at JFK Airport in New York, delays jumped 114 percent between October 2006 and July 27.

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