"It will take drastic action to make air travel bearable again. This week, after three years, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals gave Kennedy International Airport permission to shoot some birds that fly around the runways threatening to cause plane crashes. This ruling — and the three years it took to appear — shed some light on a subject I’ve wondered about for a long time: Why is air travel so grotesquely unpleasant?"
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"So why don’t we build more airports? Because airports need to be built near the cities they serve. The cities they serve are controlled by leftists who make construction a Sisyphean nightmare. Take our own New York City. JFK is the worst airport in the country. It would like to refurbish itself, improve and expand, but it’s surrounded on three sides by neighborhoods that wouldn’t tolerate the Concorde; that barely tolerate JFK as it is now and will brook no expansion. On its fourth side, JFK is bounded by federally protected wetlands, so that’s a non-starter too. New construction has to be on JFK’s existing footprint, and that new construction has to abide by New York’s absurdly onerous labor and environmental laws. Nonetheless, Governor Cuomo insists that JFK’s rebuilding will happen. According to Forbes, Cuomo’s plan for JFK will address New York’s passenger needs from 2050 forward.
To put that in perspective, if the Wright Brothers’ first flight were this year, Cuomo would be talking about fixing JFK in time for the invention of the jet. Now imagine that JFK were being started from scratch."
And an alternate opinion below: Who ruined air travel? The airlines, their union and their politicians.