When newcomers to the Las Vegas Valley view the darkened eastern sky, they routinely confuse some bright specks of light for stars. But these objects move, growing brighter before dropping to the horizon.

These stars are, of course, jetliners carrying scores of visitors to Southern Nevada. Like the line at a hotel buffet, the queue of arriving aircraft ebbs and flows but never really disappears.

McCarran International Airport had another record year in 2005, handling 44.3 million arriving and departing passengers. The total represents a nearly 7 percent increase over passenger traffic in 2004.

Passenger growth won't slow anytime soon. Five years from now, the Strip will be lined with new properties and the valley's permanent population will exceed 2 million.

More than $2.4 billion worth of capital improvements at the airport will buy time, but not more runway space. McCarran could be maxed out at 53 million passengers per year by 2011.

"We're designing and building as fast as we can," Clark County Aviation Director Randall Walker says. "Our only real concern is that the growth is going to (outpace) our ability to get these facilities implemented.."

Local and federal officials have been working for years to open a second major Clark County airport. A $4 billion development is planned for the Ivanpah Valley, about 40 miles south of the Strip on the east side of Interstate 15. The new airport could handle up to 5 million passengers per year.

But county officials are not even one year into a planned five-year environmental impact study for the airport. About the soonest the airport could open is 2017 -- which means McCarran could be operating in gridlock for six or seven years before it gets relief.

That's not good news for Southern Nevada's tourist-dependent economy. The valley needs improved airport capacity to fill the tens of thousands of new guest rooms under construction or planned for Clark County -- as well as the thousands of jobs that will accompany them.

Local and federal officials must find a way to accelerate the environmental and airspace studies and fast-track congressional approval for the project. In a region that can build high-rise hotels and state-of-the-art attractions like no other, it shouldn't take another 11 years to build an airport.