Passage Summary: An editorialist argues that more planes mean less safety because that's what happened three decades ago, regardless of the technology used back then.

Conclusion: Increasing air traffic beyond an airport's original design capacity will inevitably decrease safety.

Reasoning: Studies from 30 years ago showed that safety decreased in similar situations, even when the airports implemented the best safety technology available at that time.

Analysis: The argument suffers from a classic temporal flaw, assuming that what was true 30 years ago must be true today. It fails to consider that modern safety technology might be significantly more effective at handling high traffic volumes than the 'latest' technology of the 1990s. When looking for the flaw, focus on the editorialist's reliance on outdated data to make a definitive claim about current conditions. The gap lies in the assumption that technological progress hasn't changed the safety equation in three decades.