One of the more trivial news stories of recent months has to do with the push by interested parties to increase the number of direct flights from around the country to Reagan Airport. Other interested parties oppose the proposed changes.
Reagan Airport, if you're not familiar with it, lies on an island in the Potomac River at the edge of Washington DC. It's very convenient to the National Mall and all the offices near there. Some years ago the government built Dulles International Airport, half an hour west, in Virginia. In order to push the use of the inconveniently located Dulles, they adopted some complex regulations that limit the number of flights that can use Reagan.
Consequently, a number of major cities around the country can't get direct air service to Reagan Airport. There are none, for example, to Reagan from San Diego, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso or San Antonio. People in those cities, all of which have populations in excess of half a million people, have to fly to Dulles, or have a stopover in some intermediate city.
This makes no difference to me. I don't fly to any place I can reach by car. But other people seem to like flying places. And as a Republican (a real Republican, not one of those Libertarian lunatics at the fringe of the party) I think that the question of which flights can go to which airport ought to be determined by market forces, unsullied by official favouritism, which is a form of corruption.
So. Changes to gate allocations at Reagan involve Congress, so there's really no chance the resolution to this manufactured controversy will be fair or logical or even sensible. Both sides are investing some money in advertising, presuming that someone will be persuaded to pressure their congressman to support one side or another. Which brings me to the point of this blog post.
One side -- I presume it's the side trying to avoid change, but I could be wrong; I don't actually read the ads -- is claiming in its advertisement headlines (the only part that I do read) that Reagan National Airport is already at capacity and can't handle additional flights. I see that ad usually once or twice a week on a news update I get each weekday morning. And I thought, I wonder if that's really true; so I thought I'd check.
Now, I don't know how many flights in and out Reagan Airport can handle, so I started with the assumption that it's no more than they actually handle now. So I looked at the airport's website yesterday, and found that there were 50 flights arriving, and 58 flights departing, in the two-hour span between 5pm and 7pm. So the airport's capacity is at least 52 flights per hour.
Then I looked at the flights between 10pm and Midnight. In that two-hour window, there were only 25 arrivals and 23 departures. (I also happened to notice that there were only two flights arriving between 9pm and 10pm, though there were still 27 flights departing in that hour.)
So clearly, Reagan Airport is not at capacity.
