Rural areas, small towns and medium-sized airports have long had a strong say on Capitol Hill. The US system is designed to balance big-city states and populous states with rural areas, and 
the farm states have always had a stranglehold on the some of the key congressional committees. In the Senate, the aviation subcommittee has long been in control of rural state senators, but that is changing. The surprise retirement of a key Republican, Mississippi’s Trent Lott, will change that. Lott, whose state has only one fair-sized airport, that in Jackson, had chaired the aviation subcommittee until the democratic takeover last year. Then West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller took over, continuing that sparsely populated state’s tradition of interest in aviation. Now with Lott leaving just in time to avoid new laws that limit paid lobbying by retired senators, the aviation subcommittee has a new Republican senior member and she is, to put it diplomatically, deeply interested in the future of the big hubs at D/FW and Houston as well as airlines named American, Continental and Southwest.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (left, above), a Texas Republican and the Lone Star State’s senior senator, has her power base in North Texas, and both American and D/FW executives were thrilled that she is taking over. 
Hutchison, a former television news broadcaster who briefly served n the National Transportation Safety Board, helped broker the bill that opened Dallas’ Love Field to longer-distance flights by Southwest without upsetting either American or D/FW. She has also pushed for limits on environmental reviews on new airport construction. Private pilots like Kay Bailey, as she is called, in part because she’s not Trent Lott – the Senate’s leading proponent of a new fee on business aviation as part of the proposed revision of the FAA funding formula. The only problem: Hutchison, the highest ranking woman in the Senate, is probably in her last term, and has frequently been mentioned as possible vice presidential candidate for the 2008 Republican ticket.
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