Lots of stuff to talk about in the news, and it just keeps getting worse.There was a fake story that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News a couple of weeks ago that said that they were starting a new airline called Derrie-Air [flyderrie-air.com]. And they were going to charge passengers, you guessed it, by how much they weighed.

Oh my God. Do you know how many people believed that story?

As laughable as it was, you know what? Do you really put it beyond the airlines to put a scale out there by the check in counter? I don’t.

I’ve said this before: I’ve had the chairman of one of the largest airlines in the world on one day and said, “I want you to look me straight in the eye and tell me that you’re not considering putting on pay toilets.” And you know what he said? “It’s not on the list yet.”

Pay toilets and scales are the only two things that are not on the list that we know of yet, and it’s just going to get crazier.

Now, having said that, you’ve all heard these buzz words like “stay-cation,” which I think is garbage. Now reports are saying that people aren’t going to be traveling as much. Garbage.

Guess what? We’re just adjusting the way we travel because we’re not going to be denied. We all want to travel, we just want to figure out a way to do it so that we don’t have to mortgage our house because, let’s face it, based on the economy of this country, we can’t mortgage our house.

It’s weird, but the bottom line is it’s summer, we’re traveling, we’re just trying to do it better. The weirdest thing is we’re still going to Italy and France. Have you not looked at the exchange rate with the euro? We’re just not going for two weeks—we’re going for one. Certain things don’t change.

Consider this: We’ve been told that the airlines are reducing flights; they’re cutting capacity. I was on a flight going from New York’s LaGuardia to Washington National. That is aflight that takes, in the air, 33 minutes. And guess what? They held the plane on the ground because of air traffic control. It’s a 33-minute flight that turned into a three-hour flight, and when I came back the next day, it was a 33-minute flight that turned into a four-hour flight.

Let’s hear it for Amtrak. I will bet you this (and, by the way, don’t take the bet): If we both left from Manhattan at the same time and you went out to LaGuardia to fly down to Washington on a 33-minute flight and I went to Penn Station to take the Amtrak Acela on a train ride that takes two hours and 50 minutes, I will beat you every time.

What does that say about the state of our air traffic control system with or without high fares?

And now that we’re talking about high fares, listen to this: Go on some of the Web sites, whether it’s the United Airlines site, American Airlines site, or Kayak, one of the big search aggregators. Punch up what they want to charge you on United Airlines to go on their shuttle nonstop for all of 33 minutes from LaGuardia to Washington National. $839. Now, for $839 I can basically go to London and back. I can’t afford to be there once I get there, but I can go there.

There is no sanity left in air travel because I can criss-cross the United States twice for what the United Airlines folks want to charge me for a shuttle flight with my Captain Skippy with my knees up against my neck for 33 minutes of air time, but three-and-a-half hours of actual travel time.

So guess what? We have fewer planes, we have less capacity, and the delays are just as bad. Absolutely crazy.

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