I think it's bullshit and a big waste of money that the government is wasting money on overhauling ATC. Going to GPS and such definitely has its benefits but as any pilot or controller will tell you the problem isn't the routes it's the airports. Before you put an airplane in the sky you have to have a place for it to land. Gates and slots are so tight they are almost inflexible. This creates a network effect of delays in one airport cascades to others. Planes that are late can't be cleaned and boarded so it pushes other planes waiting for the gate to also be delayed.
What needs to be abandoned is the hub-spoke airport system. It had it's place in the 80s when computers weren't very powerful but algorithms and processors have improved and route optimizations would be so much better.
I think the real problem is they don't keep sufficient spare planes ready to roll at airports. Granted that's an extremely expensive proposition, but even a little extra slack can greatly reduce delay propagation. As you increase efficiency you can always increase utilization to the point where the system becomes unstable.
Edit: I am not suggesting you need a spare at every airport, just that increasing the quantity of spares or increasing scheduling slack time fight delay propagation where increasing efficiency does not.
Carriers live and die by turnaround time to keep their jets making money (or at least, not losing money as quickly...) A significant part of SWA's competitive advantage is their industry leading turnaround time.
Having every carrier have to park a standby jet (even just one), flight crew and full cabin crew at each of their airports is going to flow pretty quickly (and stoutly) to the ticket price. (There are duty limits for flight and cabin crews, and being on active-standby, such as you'd need to be in order to effectively reduce delays, counts against those limits.)
Consumers want cheap tickets. Airlines are providing that, sometimes at the hidden expense to those consumers of delays and cancellations.
I agree with everything you said about the cost. However, large airlines do keep hot spares at a few locations. Low turnaround time is great, but sometimes something major breaks and you need to be able to pick up the slack. There are even companies who provide "generic" airplanes for this purpose.
PS: The incentives are somewhat skewed. Customers who have already paid for a flight still need to get where they are going so they accept delays.
How many spare houses, spare cars, spare anything do you keep. These aren't a couple of dinner plates. These are machines that are hugely expensive. Just having them costs money. Where do you park it? And if you need one how do you get to it. Major airlines do keep spares, but only at their major airports.
I agree that what we need to do is pour more concrete, but that runs into all the NIMBYs who want all the other airports to have more runways, except for the one within 10 miles of their house. That one needs to be closed and a new one built 25 miles away, but if that can't happen, at least they don't want any new runways...
Computer power doesn't make the hub and spoke system much less attractive. The most efficient way to create a big route network is having a bunch of planes fly into the same city, waiting an hour and a half, let everyone change planes, and then fly back to where they came from. If it's a big city, then everyone who lives in that big city can get direct flights to all of the cities in the network. This means that you want an airport with tons of runways in the middle of a big city for the most efficient route network. Thus, you get ORD, DFW, and ATL, all big cities with big airports with lots of parallel runways. There will always be an airline that wants to make a big city without a big airport with lots of parallel runways their hub. Then you end up with what happens in New York, and what happened in Chicago until the recent runway construction.
What needs to be abandoned is the hub-spoke airport system. It had it's place in the 80s when computers weren't very powerful but algorithms and processors have improved and route optimizations would be so much better.