Airlines will cancel flights rather than pay delay fees

We should have seen this one coming: Now facing potential fines of up to $27,500 per passenger for planes that end up waiting on the runway for more than three hours, some airlines say they'd rather cancel flights. Of course they would, at $5 million for a full 757, that's a lot of cash per plane in delay fees (the article doesn't say how much a cancellation would cost).

There has to be a better solution. Such as, maybe, "doing a better job of scheduling flights and crews," as a U.S. Transportation Department spokesman suggested in the article?