Air travelers' bill of rights is taking flight

As of August, there were just two flights this year at Mitchell Field that had "taxi out" times of three hours or more, and just one at Dane County Regional Airport. There were 14 other flights that sat on the tarmac here for two hours, according to Sharyn Wisniewski, the airport's marketing and communications manager.

But those 15 long delays were out of 13,246 departures, she points out.

"Which is one-hundredth of one percent," she says. "So I guess Carol Skornicka is right."

Of course, one of the downsides of flying out of Madison is that, although the situation is improving, there are just 15 nonstop destinations. On the other hand "There's just a much greater jockeying of aircraft at the larger airports," Wisniewski notes. "And if you have any bad weather at all, you have all these airliners waiting to take off. And in some cases, they have only a few more runways than we do."

That's not to suggest Madison's airport never has problems, she says. But compared to everyone else, we look pretty darn good.