Airline Trouble by Eva Matova

Huge delays of flights have spoiled the celebration of Thanksgiving to many American families. According to the Transportation Department, the October's situation had been the second worst on record of airline industry's on-time performance. The number of customer complaints arose from 629 complaints recorded last October to 1096 this year. As the Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters reported on Monday "tough scrutiny and a willingness to impose serious penalties have caused the airlines to correct these chronically delayed flights". The government and the Federal Aviation Administration promised to pay attention to this problem. One of the possible solutions could be a new, satellite-based air traffic control system, which is recommended by the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration. The system would cost about $15 billion and it would take about 20 years to complete the improvement. The government prefers alleviation of the delays by reducing JFK's flight limit by 20 percent. This solution is not suitable for the airline industry's trade and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owners of the JFK, though. After all the trouble, there is at least one number which had improved; the rates of mishandled baggage dropped from 7.5 reports last year to 5.4 reports per 1000 passengers.

by Eva Matova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

PocketNews is a new real-time news broadcaster delivering the latest and hottest news right to your pocket ! With global clients who want to be kept up to date, PocketNews is everyone's way of keeping in touch with the World.