That recommendation seems excessive, I live 3+ hours from the airport which means I have to leave a lot of time for incidentals en route, and never get there THAT early... 2H tops for domestic, if I lived 15 minutes from the airport I'd probably get there 1:15 early.

Security is rarely more than 20-30 mins without pre-check, 10 with.

With border and homeland security finally in patriot control, I expect airport security spending will relocate a bit, that will move the next bottleneck to Air Traffic Control...

... coincidentally I started re-watching Ground Control yesterday with my kids after letting my oldest play a few minutes of Airport Madness and him getting hooked.

The first few minutes of that movie play out exactly what they disclosed in Newark earlier this year, systems going down while IT duct-taped cables back together. The entire premise of the movie is based on their being critically short-staffed.

That movie is from 1993.

That Newark conversation coordinated with the regime change does lead me to think the pendulum is swinging back, and we're on the precipice of another 50's-like building period we're still living off of today.

I don't think the economics of airports becoming malls get in the way of this, rich people aren't going to big airports any more... thats a lot of lost revenue because people are paying to fly out of small airports on private charter. Also there is demand destruction to be reversed, there's still plenty of incentive to make air travel more efficient.