Why fly?

The Professor’s Fox column today makes some good points. I was especially interested to see the comment from the guy who said if he could drive it in 5-6 hours, why take the plane? This actually echoes a report I read some time back that said if you can drive it in under 6-8 hours, you get there in about the same amount of time as if you flew. [UPDATE FOR CLARIFICATION: The time span they were talking about started when you left your home and ended when you reached your ultimate destination, so it included time to find a parking space at the airport, time spent in line, time spent renting your car, time spent driving from the airport to your destination — in short, it was door-to-door time, not flight time. When I flew into BWI last time, door to door was close to six hours. When I flew back it was close to eight.]
I’ve been driving from Indianapolis to Washington DC on business several times a year now since October 1994. I don’t like to fly to begin with, and I can count the number of times I’ve flown out there in the last eight years on the fingers of one hand, and those times were usually because I had to be there early in the morning for meetings. Getting married two years ago added trips to York PA to visit the in-laws. Flying into Harrisburg is a non-starter because there are no direct flights. Flying into BWI is a serious hassle and flying out of it is even worse (as I learned the hard way back in July on my first flight out of there since before 9/11). It’s a 10-hour drive to either York or DC, so normally we take a leisurely 5 or 6 hour drive to Wheeling, spend the night, and drive the rest of the way the next morning. Much less hassle than flying and it costs less, too, even with the hotel room figured in.
I’ve informed my wife that after the BS I went through in July, I have no intention of flying anywhere that I can drive in 12h or less. Unfortunately we make a couple of trips to Naples FL every year, which means we have to fly or take three days to get there, so I’ve resigned myself to flying for that purpose. But as for the East Coast, it’s a no-fly zone as far as I’m concerned. When Norm Mineta is eliminated and pilots are armed and young Middle Eastern males are profiled instead of people like my 73 year old mother (who was searched and made to take her shoes off back in March at BWI because she had forgotten she had a nail file in her purse that had somehow made it through the scanners in Indy), it might be worth the trouble again. Not now.
And it’s not just you and me and fliers in general who ought to be complaining about this. The airlines themselves should be up in arms. This is costing them beaucoup money and has to be a PR nightmare for them. Everyone conveniently forgets that 9/11 was an airport security failure that had little to do with the airlines themselves. But it’s flashier to blame (and sue) the airlines.
I do keep thinking to myself that Amtrak ought to be sold to someone like American or United. Or maybe Southwest. I suspect an airline model like Southwest’s might fix Amtrak pretty quickly (a lot of useless employees would get the sack and the rest would shape up if they expected to keep their jobs, “milk run” stops would be eliminated — half the problem with the Cardinal is that it stops at every podunk town between Chicago and DC and it runs only 3 times a week — trains would pull out on time and reach their destinations on time). If we had decent intercity rail we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. But it takes 18h to take the train from here to DC, so why would I? And the only way to get to Florida from here on a train is to take the train to DC first. Stupid.