Tag Archives for airline deregulation act.
The Sabena case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Sabena’s defense was that this was common practice in the industry. Airlines all denied it, and pointed fingers at other carriers including Pan Am and TWA as well as KLM and other foreign carriers flying across the North Atlantic. Ultimately a consent decree was entered into, and an Iberia executive was jailed for continuing the practice.
The meat of Lorenzo’s argument is this: airlines are forced to comply with more stringent rules than exist for other industries.
I told you back in September that you’d start hearing a lot more about re-regulating the airlines in the months ahead. An advisor to Elizabeth Warren was coming out with a new book making that case. But the arguments are weak and maybe even disingenuous? Because Professor Sitaraman is a really smart guy and he’s studied his topic in depth so surely he has to know that the arguments he’s marshaling are superficial and wrong?
There’s a shot across the bow of aviation – an intellectual case is being made for airlines to revert to the status of public utilities. Sitaraman’s upcoming book can be seen as a starting gun for arguments over regulating the airline industry. The arguments for this used to be unserious, by folks like Robert Kuttner. That’s changing, and with a direct line to people in power.
People who care about not making air travel worse need to wake up to the threat, though there is also much we should be doing that would make air travel better.
One of the more complicated legal issues I come across is what airline practices states are allowed to regulate, and which ones they aren’t. The Airline Deregulation Act makes issues of price, routes, and service a matter for federal regulation, seeking to avoid a ‘patchwork’ of 50 sets of rules for interstate travel.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, though, that California’s meal and rest break rules can be applied to airline crew. And that’s true even for crew who spend a majority of their work time outside the state.
Former White House Chief of Staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is known for saying ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’ It’s an opportunity to push an agenda. So as the airline bailout train leaves the station some people are advocating the consumer protection rules that they wanted anyway. Others (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) want the financial reforms they want anyway.
If you hate air travel you want to use this crisis to nationalize the airlines, an idea put forward by the left wing American Prospect.
Airline lobbyists are trying to curtail the power of the Department of Transportation to engage in consumer protection. They want to be regulated just like other industries, with definitions employed by the Federal Trade Commission. But this ignores how other industries are regulated by the states and consumers through the courts, which the airlines are frequently excused from by the Airline Deregulation Act.
The conniving 14 year old gets short shrift in all of the legal maneuvering. He was being watched by his grandfather and “asked his grandfather to go to Starbucks to get him a Frappuccino.” While the grandfather was gone the boy went to the airport. He was apparently in league with him mom who bought him a ticket to New Orleans. The father, alerted to the plan, called the police and drove to the airport before the flight took off. Southwest let the boy travel.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
