create smaller, regional airports, to handle short-hop flights and alleviate congestion in the large "hubs,"
It wouldn't work.
It's the air corridors that are congested, not just the "hubs".
We have to make more room in the sky by traveling on the ground.
Just last week, a United Airlines flight waiting to land at Reagan National Airport near Washington came within less than a mile of a Gulfstream business jet that was climbing after taking off from another nearby airport.
I thought I read in Popular Mechanics a while back that they were considering a combination of new air traffic control methods and smaller regional airports to get a handle on things. I think the idea was the new air traffic control methods would vastly change the air corridors that you mention.
“It’s the air corridors that are congested, not just the “hubs”.”
Yuppers - and that is the fault of government trough feeders. ALPA once asked that approach and descent corridors be established at airports. What they got was the “inverted wedding cake” and that led to the present debacle.
Only at hubs is the air crowded. The rest of America has empty skies. That should be clear to the meanest of intellects, given the number of planes and the immense number of cubic miles of American airspace.
As usual, the gooberment agency involved in this issue, FAA, is little different that all such collections of “fast food rejects”.
As an example, I discovered an unknown failure in a Republic RC-3 aircraft, commonly called a “SeaBee”. A forged aluminum part attaching the elevator to the control arm which moves said part had developed a crack.
The crack led to a type of flutter which caused a corkscrew motion of the entire place. Fortunately, the flutter was self dampening or I would have died in the ensuing uncontrolled flight into the ground.
FAA didn’t issue an A.D. even when given the written description, photos, and shown the failed part. Repeated calls also failed to induce those trough feeders to act.
Word was passed amongst the owners of those planes, but no FAA action occurred.
Count on gooberment trough feeders to feed, not work, Willie. And you want us to support more egregiously overpriced gooberment intrusion into transportation?
Trains can’t work - costs, technical inferiority, primitiveness, ad nauseam.