President Bush meets with Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and Acting Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bobby Sturgell in the Oval Office today. Bush is asking Peters to sort out the air-traffic mess. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.

by Mark Silva, and updated

President Bush has an idea for what to do about all the air-traffic delays that have made airline travel something of a nightmare this year: Get everyone in a room.

Bush and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters met today to announce what the White House called “new steps to address the serious problem of airport air traffic congestion and flight delays that all of us have experienced at one time or another.''

"The secretary and I have been talking about what to do about it, and I've instructed her to report back to me as quickly as possible on two matters,'' Bush said. "One, to make sure that consumers are treated fairly and complaints are listened to, and that we address some of the egregious behavior that our consumers have been subjected to. Endless hours sitting in a airplane on a runway, and there's no communication between the pilot and the airport is just not right. And so Mary is going to work very hard to make sure the system is much more responsive.''

The White House’s strategy is twofold: Reducing air traffic congestion, which, as spokeswoman Dana Perino put it, "is the root cause of all of these other problems, and improving air passenger complaint and response systems, like when your flight is over-sold and you get bumped off and you want to complain to somebody.’’

The Department of Transportation will act on its own to improve the handling of complaints, the White House says. As for the congestion which is “the root cause,’’ however, the administration plans to summon a meeting of the “stakeholders.’’

The White House today initially had said that Peters would travel to New York for these meetings, then clarified later today that the secretary will not be going to the stakeholders -- the stakeholders will be coming to the secretary.

"To clarify, each week beginning today, and concluding in December, the Department of Transportation will convene a weekly meeting of airline, airport and travel officials to discuss ways to address congestion in the New York area airports as part of the Aviation Rulemaking Committee,'' Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said this evening. "The secretary will be engaged in those meetings. However, she is not currently planning to travel to New York to meet with airline officials.''

Presumably, the stakeholders will fly to Washington.

Peters said at a briefing today: "We also have just recently undertaken an airspace redesign in the New York City area... But to help us get to the real causes of the delays, and to fix them, we're bringing together the top executives from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the airlines that operate in New York's three airports, aviation groups representing pilots, commercial airlines and general aviation, and consumer groups.''

"There is a cascading effect of the problems that are happening in that area,’’ said Dana Perino, White House press secretary. "By bringing the stakeholders together to talk about solutions, the president believes that it's a better and more enduring way to help solve a problem.

"Demand is not going to slow down for air traffic,'' she said. "People want to have more business flights and more flights for vacations and pleasure, and so we have to address these with the stakeholders involved.''

The administration also is calling on Congress to work on improving a “World War II-era system’’ for air traffic control. The White House notes it sent legislation up several months ago which has not been acted on yet.

“It's out of date and it needs to be updated,’’ Perino said. “We hope that Congress will work with us on that as well.''

Does the president have any specific improvements that he wants to see come out of those meetings with stakeholders? Not really.

The president is asking: “What can we do? Is there something that we can do now on our own, while we continue to try to work with Congress to get something done?"’’ Perino said. “That's why he wants to do it now, and he thinks by taking action today, in the end of September, we can get something in place so that next year's summer travel season can be much better.’’