One of air travel's great curses is that you have to leave for the airport a long time before your flight. Airlines routinely "recommend" you be there 2 or 3 hours ahead, and airport ride companies often take it to heart and want to pick you up many hours before even short flights. The curse is strongest on short flights, where you can easily spend as much as twice the time getting to the flight as you spend in the air.

The reality, though, is that it's not nearly that strict. I often arrive much later. I've missed 3 flights in my life -- in two cases because cheap airlines literally had nobody at the counter past their cutoff deadline, and once because United's automated bag check line was very long (I got there before the deadline) but their computer is fully strict on the deadline while humans usually are not. In all cases, I got on another flight, and the time lost to these missed flights is vastly less than the time gained by not being at the airport so early.

But it's getting harder. Airlines are getting stricter, and in a few cases offering no flexibility.

The big curse is that many of the delays can't be predicted. It may almost always take 20 minutes to get to the airport, but every so often traffic will make it 40. Security is usually only 5-10 minutes but there are times when it's 30. Car rental return, parking shuttles, called taxis and Ubers can have unexpected delays. Parking lots can be full (as happened to me this xmas after Uber failed me.) Immigration can range from 2 minutes to 1.5 hours if you have to go to secondary screening. While in theory you could research this, sometimes at strange airports you are surprised to find it's 30 minutes walk and people-mover to your gate.

If you ever fly privately, though, you will discover a different world, where even if you're just a guest you can arrive a very short time before your flight. (If you're the owner, of course, it doesn't take off until you get there.) But there are many options that can speed your trip through the airport without needing to fly a private jet:

• Tools like Google Now track traffic and warn you when you need to leave earlier to get to the airport
• If you take a cab to the airport, you eliminate the delays of parking and car return
• Though rarer today, ability to check bags in advance at remote locations helps a lot
• Curb checking of bags is great, as of course is online check-in sent to your phone
• (Not checking bags is of course better, and any savvy flyer avoids it whenever they can, but sometimes you can't.)
• Premium passengers get check-in gates with minimal lines, and premium security lines
• If you have a Global Entry or Nexus card, you can skip the immigration/customs line
• TSA PRE, "Clear" and premium passenger security lines provide a no-wait experience. Of course nobody should ever have to wait, ever.
• Failing that, offering appointments at security for a predictable security trip can remove the time risk
• Sometimes they also let people who are at risk of missing a flight skip past the security line (and some other lines)
• In some cases, premium passengers are shuttled in vehicles within the terminal or on the tarmac
• Business class passengers can board as late as they want (or as early) and still get a place in the bins on most flights

In addition, I believe that if you wanted to get your checked bag cleared quickly by the TSA for money, it could happen. Of course, we can't have everybody do this all the time, or so I presume, because it would require too much in the way of resources. But what if we allow you to do this occasionally when factors beyond your control have made you late.

What is proposed is that every so often -- perhaps one time in twenty -- when factors like traffic, long security lines or other things mostly beyond your control made you late, you could invoke an urgent need, and still make your flight.

This would allow you to budget a more reasonable time to arrive

What does this all add up to? It should be possible, at an extra cost, to get a quick trip through the airport. Say that cost is $200 (I don't think it's that much, but say that it is.) You could pay $10 extra per flight for "insurance" and be able to invoke an urgent trip every so often when things go wrong. It's worth it to pay every trip because it gives you a benefit on every trip -- you leave later, knowing you will make it even if traffic, security lines or similar factors would delay you too much.

Some of the services you might get would include:

• Somebody meets your car at the curb, takes your keys, and then parks it or returns it to the car rental facility
• Another employee meets you and checks in your bags at the curb. Your bags are put in a special urgent queue in TSA inspection. If need be a staffer walks it through.
• A golf cart takes you to security if it's not close, and you get to the front of the line.
• If your gate is far, another golf cart or escort takes you there

The natural question is, "why wouldn't you want this all the time?" And indeed you would, and a large fraction of passengers would pay a fairly high fee to get this when they need it. Airlines might make it just part of the service with high-priced tickets or super-elite flyers, and I see no reason that should not happen. The price can be set so that the demand matches the supply, based on the cost of having extra employees to handle urgent passengers.

When it comes to more "public" resources like TSA screening, they have a simple rule. You can give premium services to premium passengers if what you do also speeds up the line for ordinary passengers. A simple implementation of this is to just pay for an extra screening station for the premium passengers, because now you don't butt in line and in fact by not being in the regular line at all, you speed it up for all in it. You don't need to be so extravagant, however. For example, the "TSE PRE" line, which allows a faster trip through the X-ray (you don't have to take anything out, or remove your shoes in this line) speeds up everybody because we all wait behind people doing that. If you can show that the amount you speed up the whole process is greater than the delay you add by letting premium passengers jump the queue, it is allowed.

But as fancy as these services sound, with extra staff, they are really not that expensive. Perhaps just 20 minutes of employee time for most of it -- more if they are driving your car to a parking lot for you. (Note that this curb hand-off is forbidden by most airports because car rental companies already would like to offer it to their top customers but it is believed that would be too popular and increase traffic. Special permission would need to be arranged.)

For the "insurance" approach, a few techniques could assure it was not being abused. The frequency of use is one of them, of course, but you could also give people an app for their phones. This app, using GPS and knowing a flight is coming, would know when you left for the airport. In fact, it could give you alerts as to when to leave based on information about traffic, parking and security wait times. If you left at the reasonable departure deadline, you would get the urgent service if traffic or other surprise factors made you late. If you left after that deadline, you would not be assured the fast track path.

What would be better would be an app that actually works with all the airport functions you will interact with -- check in, the gate, bag check, passenger screening, parking lots, rental cars, traffic etc. Their databases could know their state, any special conditions, and both recommend a time to leave that will work, but even make appointments for you and tell you when to leave for them. Then your phone could guide you through the airport and do all the hard work. It would provide an ID to get you your appointment at security. It might tell you to not drive your own car and take a car service instead if that's easier than parking your car for you. It would coordinate for all the passengers using the system to make sure they flow through the airport in a well regulated manner, with no surprises, so that people don't have to try to get there hours in advance.