The Fort Worth Star Telegram Sky Talk blog reports today that American Airlines has, in fact, won a reprieve from starting their Chicago-Beijing flights until 2010.  While this approval wasn’t unexpected, it is disappointing.  I wrote about this in a previous entry  and detailed my own objections to granting these delays.  Citing economic conditions for a delay is not, in my opinion, a satisfactory justification.  These airlines made rosy promises and commitments to serve these routes and to simply throw up your hands and ask for the status quo to be maintained is both unjustified and unfair to other airlines.

There are plenty of airlines who wanted these authorities and, quite frankly, got shoved aside in favor of airlines already serving China.  I could certainly understand and approve of a short delay if planned equipment remained unavailable due to delivery problems from an aircraft manufacturer but that isn’t the case here. 

US Air has also asked for delays on their Philadelphia – China route (and cited economic conditions as well but I suspect that the fact that they have been unable to source aircraft for that route also plays a part in things.  The aircraft that makes the most sense for them, an A340, is an expensive and fuel inefficient aircraft (when compared to A330 and B777 aircraft.  They don’t want to add yet another aircraft type to their fleet and they don’t want to lose the route so they have approached the current economic climate in the airline industry as a blessing on this route.

When the Department of Transportation grants these requests for the stated reasons, they maintain the status quo and that means that airlines are not forced to either re-tune their operations and they are not required to truly compete with each other.  Neither consumers nor the nation have anything to lose by forcing the airlines to adopt business models that are realistic for themselves.  If they cannot serve the routes, someone else who is willing to try should be given a chance.

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service by ajax