Washington Ways: August 2008 Archives

So sue me, already. The FAA said so, and now the airlines have and so the feds are responding with unusual speed for any agency. And it's all over slots. No, not the kind you find in Las Vegas, even in the McCarran airport there. It's landing slots, silly. Okay, now that we've lost you and bored you, we have to ask you to try to pay attention because (a) this is really important and (b) it will be on the final exam.

The FAA now has landing slots in place at the three New York City airports as a way to ease congestion; it says that auctioning off slots when they become available to the highest bidder is a good thing. It wants to sell off Newark slots vacated by Eos, a luxury airline that went under early in the year. What's neat is that the issue has split elected officials, with New York senator Chuck Schumer moving to block the auction and Hillary (Clinton) saying she opposes it, while the city's mayor, Hizzoner Mike Bloomberg, says he favours the idea. What perplexes us is the FAA's link between auctions and the flight caps at each of the airports: flight limitations are one thing, but how does selling, leasing, or auctioning off landing rights increase capacity or decrease delays? You can find some fairly informative discussion here.

They are not yielding an inch. Or a dollar. The FAA, caught with its pants down in March and April, is standing tough on the record fines it is proposing against two of the nation's largest airlines. The agency said it would fine American Airlines $7.1 million and a day later told Southwest Airlines that it was intent on collecting a $10.2 million penalty. The Southwest penalty stems from the March revelation that the airline let planes fly without doing the required inspections; at the same time it emerged that some FAA inspectors had winked and nodded at the violations - and that whistleblower warnings about this malfeasance were ignored or punished. House Transportation Committee hearings under chairman Oberstar put the frustrated whistleblowers on show.

Speaking of fees...Well, we weren't exactly, but we were on National Public Radio's Morning Edition talking about ancillaries fees and charges. You can listen through this link. Their story ran just as US Airways' newest, charging for sodas, coffee, and water, was hitting the seats and just as JetBlue's $7 pillow-and-blanket set was getting a lot of attention. TIME magazine, the widely read newsweekly, named US Airways the stingiest airline, but we wonder if they've seen its financials: a $567-million deficit.                                                                                    

  Left Field gets on the late news, with the Washington Fox News outlet, Channel Five, featuring a shot of our blog from the other day, Bleak Autumn for Flight Schedules (II). Seems that OAG's report of some 60 million seats disappearing this winter caught their eye and they came by. The same channel caught Left Field at Washington's Reagan National Airport back in June, when we were headed for a low-cost airlines conference in Florida. Fox 5, which likes to show its independence from Uncle Rupert's larger Fox farm, runs its news an hour earlier than the other Washington network affiliates, and so gets a fairly good viewership. Or so we hope.  At left, definitely NOT Left Field, but Melanie Alnwick, the Fox 5 reporter who schlepped out to National to interview us.                                                              

Another Norm sighting. Norm, as former Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta is called by most aviation-people in Washington, is looking good. He's been at a recent airline summit and aviation club lunches and he is at least as spry as when he was at L'Enfant Plaza (the old home of the Transport Department). And he's been busy. He just wrote and signed a letter to his successor, Mary Peters, urging the department to approve Evergreen International for a US-China cargo route. Two other carriers, Kalitta and TradeWinds, are also seeking the route, but Evergreen has done it work, garnering letters from Mineta as well as the Ohio congressional delegation, Washington State members of Congress and. But getting Norm, now the vice-chairman of DC powershop Hill & Knowlton, is a coup.