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By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
ATLANTA — Traffic in the city once dubbed "the poster child of sprawl" is notoriously bad. But hopping a flight from the suburbs to the airport to avoid gridlock? C'mon!
That's exactly what a small regional airline is going to offer. Starting next month, Lawrenceville, Ga.-based Wings Air will have four 15-minute flights a day between Gwinnett County Airport-Briscoe Field and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest. Wings Air President Charlie Mintz says the service targets business people with early-morning flights out of Hartsfield who don't wish to get up "at 3 or 4 a.m." to avoid the region's unpredictable traffic when trying to get to a 9 a.m. flight. "I call this the ultimate HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane," he says. "You fly over the traffic." The flights, on Piper Navajo Chieftain planes that seat 7-9 passengers each, will cost $79 each way, which Mintz says is competitive with taxi fares for the 43-mile one-way trip. "Plus, nowadays if you miss your flight because of traffic, the airlines charge $75 to catch the next flight," he says. Traffic-congestion experts cite the problem of unpredictability: When people don't know which day they'll experience an hour-long delay, they have to build in that extra hour — wasted time when traffic flows smoothly. Tim Lomax, a researcher at the Texas Transportation Institute, says it isn't surprising that businesses respond to that reality. "If your time is at all valuable, you certainly think about issues like what this airline is reacting to," he says. "It's another one of these congestion industries." David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents the nation's major airlines, says it's not uncommon for passengers to fly from one airport to another in the same metro area. He cites Allegheny County Airport, which feeds Pittsburgh International Airport; Van Nuys Airport and Los Angeles International; and Scottsdale Airport and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Those are all busy feeders: Allegheny County Airport is the fifth busiest in Pennsylvania; Van Nuys is the world's busiest general aviation airport and Scottsdale was the nation's second-busiest single-runway airport in 2004, according to their websites. Gwinnett County-Briscoe Field now has no scheduled flights, says Matthew Smith, the county's airport division director. Mintz says his will be the only scheduled air shuttle service from metro Atlanta to Hartsfield-Jackson.
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