Keep beating that drum, honey! They deserve every bit of it.

Pretty soon, the TSA will be yelling #BungaBunga and strip-searching the women.

The TSA is funded by the DHS, the ATC system is the FAA and DOT. Two different agencies.

Ray LaHood is being as deceptive as everyone in his statements as everyone else.

The airline industry won't allow it. Or else the whole system will actually collapse.

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is like a biological system. You can't arbitrarily shut down the left index finger for eight hours without putting poison into the rest of the system. The way the system is setup is that you can't leave from L.A. to land in Topeka, KS until you are reasonably sure have a landing spot in Topeka. If the weather is expected to shutdown the airport, you can't launch. So the airline that has a flight leaving at 10 PM from LA to NYC with a stop in Topeka will either no longer service Topeka because the landing was after midnight. Or risk trapping passengers in Topeka over night.

The landing spot doctrine for overseas flights is done a little differently. Those are scheduled with the recipient airport's ATC having the plane scheduled into the capacity.

An apocryphal story from years ago. The airline exec came into the job and looked at the books and said we need to end these red-eye flights, they're always losing money. The schedulers then had to explain to him the flights would have to fly, with or without passengers. The CEO asks "Why?" The response, "We have to position the planes for the next day."

LaHood can yell and say we are going to shut down the towers. But there are any number of people in the feeder airports that catch that Monday 5:45 AM flight to NYC, Chicago, etc. that aren't going to change their expectations. They also fly home Friday night and expect to land a 1 AM Saturday morning. And the airlines are going to move aircraft regardless.

Let's see how this works out.

It seems like an outrage - an American capital city with two airports and no commercial service (charters notwithstanding) - but you can't fly to Topeka on a commercial airline.

You'd have to fly to Kansas City and drive the 75 miles to get there.

But I get Jim's point. It's a big organic system feeding from one side and distributing to the other. Apparently some of the polyps, like Topeka, have been excised for smoother flow.

You'd have to fly to Kansas City and drive the 75 miles to get there. -- Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 25, 2013 3:00 PM

Gog,

You're right, I picked Topeka out of my posterior region. I was needing a reasonable stop in the middle of the country that wasn't necessarily a hub like O'Hare, DFW, Stapleton, etc.

I could see them trying to shutdown Kansas City, but then you will have that airport authority yelling if that was a common flight path.

I live equidistant from three commercial airports. Two are full international airports (24/7) and the other one has an international port authority/customs detail and is about 5AM to 1AM.

If the FAA were to excise enough polyps and put enough tourniquets on the system, it would fail.

We have seen this already with the recent merger announcement of American Airlines and U.S. Airways. The TSA helped, but the FAA also played a part. The need for the big birds to be under control of ATC constantly is no longer needed. The traffic control system has been slowly upgraded with collision avoidance systems and onboard/ground systems that the ATC ground . The ATC watching the airspace in the five states surrounding New Mexico are just parroting the computers. They generally aren't delivering devised thought.