And in the extremely unlikely event that the highly popular petition should result in a price cap on flights and holidays, the effect would be dramatically to diminish our travel options, and push up the cost of those that remain.
The air traffic change that has attracted the most attention has been the imposition of hourly caps on flight schedules at Kennedy and Newark, matching a longstanding cap at La Guardia.
Increased capacity (more runways, for starters), instead of arbitrary caps on flights, is the real solution.
Once the first phase of NextGen is in operation, the Port Authority should seek to have the caps on flights lifted and begin making room for new runways and gates to accommodate the increasing traffic, the report says.
But Ms. Lin said that tens of thousands of people have used Chromebooks in airports and that Google and Virgin America frequently lend the maximum number of computers, which is capped on flights because of the availability of in-air bandwidth.
Screw the cap on securely.
The report comes less than a year after the federal government lifted the cap on the number of flights permitted to operate at Kennedy during peak hours.
(Kennedy International, O'Hare in Chicago and Reagan National in Washington are the only other airports so busy that the government puts a cap on the number of flights).
But they have strongly opposed proposals to impose a cap on the number of flights and to take some landing slots from current carriers and auction them to the highest bidder.
Yeo, a countryside minister in John Major's government and a strong environmentalist, said that new EU rules which came into force in January and placed a cap on overall emissions for flights that start or finish in the EU had "changed the argument completely" and given ministers cover to change course.
In what it views as a short-term measure to ease congestion, the F.A.A. will reduce the number of flights at La Guardia, set a cap on the number of new flights through next September and hold a lottery for these slots.
