Regulation Reform Is Needed.

This past Saturday, I was sitting in the Portland airport killing time by skimming through a newspaper. One of the stories reported that American Airlines was reducing the “pitch” by two inches between rows of seats on a large order of new Boeing jets being delivered over the next several months.
 

 Two inches doesn’t sound like a lot, but “pitch” is airline lingo for the distance from the back of your seat to the back of my seat. Two inches is significant . . . especially if, like me, you happen to live a minimum of five hours by jet from anywhere. That’s a long time to be without those two inches. And what if, God forbid, a planeload of us sardines should ever have to evacuate one of these cramped aluminum tubes.
 
How can they get away with that, you ask? Well, Congress has taken a lot of the regulatory responsibility away from the Federal Aviation Agency and today nobody seems ready to tell an airline they can’t do something.
 
I’m certainly aware that government regulations can be onerous, but it’s time to go back to the days when campaign contributions were limited and we knew who made them. That’s just basic . . . isn’t it? Isn’t it??