The President took a look at all the crowded airports and said, “We can do better.” And apparently, we will. As reported by the Associated Press, the Pentagon is going to open up unused military airspace from Florida to Maine, which will create a kind of “Thanksgiving Express Lane” for us commercial travelers.

This “express lane” will be open next week from Wednesday through Sunday, the busiest traveling days of the holiday. And, officials are going to do something similar at Christmas time, plus, they will impose a holiday moratorium on nonessential FAA maintenance projects, so that these personnel (and their equipment) can be used to help flights stay on time.

2-final pieces of welcome news: the Dept. of Transportation is going to propose doubling the “bump” fee given to passengers who are forced to give up their seats. That would bring them up to a range of $400 to $800 (although if this does go through, it won’t take effect til summer). And there’s a proposal to institute new penalties on airlines with flights that are defined as “chronically delayed”; in other words, a flight that operates more than 15-minutes late, more than 70% of the time.

Sounds good to me. How about you?