FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1978
1978 - 0005.PDF
FLIGHT International, 7 January 1978 Air Iransp^rt Carter gives Dallas-London to Braniff PRESIDENT CARTER has overturned a major part of the US Civil Aero nautics Board's transatlantic route de cision, awarding the valuable Dallas- London route to Braniff despite the CAB recommendation, after much de liberation, that the new route should go to Pan Am. The CAB recommen dation that Delta Air Lines should serve Atlanta-London was confirmed, as was the designation of Northwest to link the northern USA with Scan dinavia. Pan Am immediately attacked Car ter's decision in vitriolic terms. Pan Am chairman William T. Seawell said his airline was outraged. . . . We do not think that the President's decision was governed by considerations of foreign policy," he said. "Rather, it appears to have been dictated by the kind of political manipulation that the President promised would not charac terise his administration." Seawell announced that Pan Am had asked the CAB to delay its for mal order putting the Presidential de cision into effect, and that Pan Am would file a formal petition for its re consideration. Pan Am officials appear privately far from confident that the petition will be successful. Although its language is more diplomatic than Seawell's verbal statement, the peti tion still suggests that President Car ter was acting under "a misconception of his authority" and "on the basis of legally defective data." Both Delta and Braniff are pressing ! ahead with plans to start services. > Braniff said just after Christmas that it planned to inaugurate a daily, non- ' stop round trip "within 60-90 days" , using wide-body aircraft. Both Delta , and Braniff will be seeking to lease , aircraft for the early days of services. Braniff says that it is considering all three wide-body long-haul types avail able, but that Dallas-London is a 747 route rather than a TriStar 500 or DC-10-30/40 market. Whatever hap pens, Braniff tells Flight, "we will have a 747 on the route by summer 1979." The airline will use a smaller type to replace DC-8-62s. Delta intends to start in April with leased McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30s. Like Braniff, it will start the service with one round trip daily, and like Braniff it has an immediate shortage of long-haul aircraft. Delta took op tions on a single 747SP and a DC-10-30 last March. Delta's service will operate into Gatwick, as does British Caledonian's Atlanta service. The BAA welcomes this as a boost for London's second airport, offsetting the blow of Iberia's refusal to move its services. The Bran iff service is expected to use Heath row. Welcoming the new route, Delta chairman W. T. Beebe pointed out that "Delta has developed one of the world's most effectively integrated air line traffic-gathering systems at Atlan ta." In Delta's opinion, this will be the most important factor in ensuring the success of the route; Braniff's chal lenge to the CAB's choice of Pan Am for Dallas-London was based on the fact that, like Delta and Atlanta, it had a strong feeder system. The CAB submitted its initial recom mendations in the Transatlantic Route Proceeding in June 1976, shortly be fore the British Government denoun ced the 1946 Bermuda air services agreement and froze further action on the routes. One of the last acts of the retiring Ford administration, in early 1977, was to return the CAB decision unsigned. After the Bermuda 2 agree ment was initialled President Carter asked the CAB to recommend carriers for the new routes opened to the UK. The recommendation that Pan Am should serve Dallas was not made without considerable heart-searching on the part of the CAB, but Board chairman Alfred Kahn steadily be came convinced that it was the best solution for the economics of the US international flag-carrier system as a whole. When the decision went to the White House in October it was not ex pected that President Carter would seek to make major changes to the CAB decision, although Braniff pro fessed confidence throughout that the decision on Dallas would be reversed. • Braniff has filed with the US Civil Aeronautics Board for authority to offer a "home free fare" between ten US city pairs. Initially Braniff is seek ing permission for a six-month experi ment with the fare, starting on February 1. The ten markets chosen are a cross- section of the city pairs already served by Braniff, in terms of distance, density and market composition. Braniff also says that it will offer the new fare on any new domestic routes awarded to it by the CAB, clearly with an eye to the recent CAB statement that it would show preference to route applications containing low-fare service proposals. Any passenger booking 14 days in advance can qualify for the "home free fare," which offers return trans port for the price of the full-economy one-way ticket. Britain and France challenge SST noise rule US PROPOSALS to apply first-genera tion FAR Part 36 noise rules to Con cordes flown after 1980 "lack both fairness and logic," a French Govern ment official told a public hearing in Washington last month. The Federal Aviation Administration's Notice of 1987 US CONCORDE OPERATIONS Airport Kennedy Dulles Anchorage Boston Dallas/Fort Worth Honolulu Los Angeles Miami San Francisco Chicago Houston Philadelphia Seattle FAA 224 70 56 28 36 28 42 42 70 42 6 70 14 728 British Aerospace 80-100 20-30 50-60 10-20 10-20 25-35 20-30 5-25 10-20 U-20 230-360 Proposed Rule-Making 77-23 would re quire all supersonic transport aircraft using US airports to meet the noise rules laid down by FAR Part 36 in 1969, but would grant "grandfather rights" to British Aerospace/Aerospa tiale Concordes flown before January 1, 1980. This would effectively bar any Concordes beyond the currently auth orised batch of 16 aircraft from oper ating into the USA. The British and French are opposing the rule on the grounds that the cut off date is arbitrary. They also contend that the rule ignores the Federal re quirements that noise rules should be "economically reasonable, technologi cally practicable and appropriate to the type of aircraft to which they apply." British officials at the Washington hearing suggested that a limitation on Concorde operations based on a level of weekly movements would be
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
