President Bush Takes Action to Ease the Hassle of Turkey Day Travel

Interesting -- and extremely helpful -- news out of the White House relating to travel has emerged this week: President Bush plans on issuing some sort of stra-tegery type memorandums that should make getting where you need to go on Thanksgiving a whole heck of a lot easier.

The marquee item in his strategy for reducing air traffic congestion during the busy Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons is the temporary opening of airspace typically dedicated to the military to commercial airliners. Last year, the Pentagon freed up two East Coast corridors during Thanksgiving; Bush said that was being expanded this year to also include the Mideast, the Southwest and the West Coast, including the skies around Los Angeles and Phoenix.

[...]A lot of our citizens are nervous about travel,” Bush said in remarks before hundreds of employees at the Department of Transportation. “They are saying ‘Will traveling home for the holidays be a wonderful life or will it be the nightmare before Christmas?”

Bad movie puns aside, that's tremendously helpful news ... you would think. Certainly more airspace = less congestion = more flights on time = more time nursing the gravy bowl. Right? Perhaps not.

A National Air Traffic Controllers Association (Really? There's one of those?) spokesman pointed out that all the huff and puff surrounding these announcements really only serves to make citizens think that there's a lot of efficiency being processed through the national travel network, when the reality is that it makes very little difference.