The Dallas Morning News Airline Biz Blog has THIS entry.   Continental wants any exemptions granted by the DOT for the 3-Hour Rule to be extended to the entire NYC airspace area (JFK, EWR and LGA airports essentially) claiming they are to interconnected and interdependent and one problem at one airport potentially causes problems at another airport.   There is some truth to that.  What is spoken is that airlines haven’t decided to be a part of the solution to those problems. 

What this really is about is just undermining the rule with exemptions.  Get one foot in the door on that issue and you’ll likely undermine the entire rule with more and more exemptions.  The New York City area is just the best place to start as it has the best conditions for claiming a need right now.   Take note that airlines want government off their backs (to semi-quote Jeff Smisek of Continental) but have not implemented restraint on their parts nor have they sought an industry solution to the overly congested NYC area other than to ask for a “NextGen” ATC system.  The NYC area has been congested since the 1960’s.   I’ll point out that airlines didn’t want the government off their backs post September 11th. 

This bothers me for 2 reasons.  One, undermining the rule is just bad policy right now until you’ve had an opportunity to operate under it.  You make a much better case for these exemptions if you can show both the operational and economic impact of them.  Two, it’s a distraction for the airlines.  It  bothers me that airlines have allowed themselves to become distracted by fighting this rule instead of planning for its impact and getting on with their business.  There are other, very important problems for many of these same airlines to solve such as labor contracts, equipment purchases and even fuel hedging. 

Let’s face it, most all of these airlines asking for exemptions are airlines that could stand to be focusing more on solving other problems that shareholders are impacted by to a far larger degree.   Shareholders haven’t really been given much by legacy airlines in terms of real value for their investments. 

You can fight this PR battle in the news like this and lose and Ithink the airlines will lose this one.  Now, they’re not in the habit of losing much anymore as they’ve have asked for and received a great deal of consideration from the government over the past 10 years.  Unfortunately, there really isn’t much good will left out there for airlines and we now have a very different government in place. 

It’s interesting to me that a group of airlines such as ours can spend so much time, effort and energy fighting something like this but won’t come together and make a concerted industry effort to lobby for a real implementation of better ATC control. 

I might be wrong but I really don’t think there is much tolerance left for an industry that has received as much consideration as the airlines have who hasn’t tried to be a part of the solution.  And despite all promises to the contrary, airlines really haven’t solved the kind of problems that the 3-Hour Rule has been put into place to solve.  For almost ten years the industry has said that this is a problem that is better solved internally.  If it had been solved internally, we wouldn’t be focused on solving this problem still (or not nearly to the degree it currently plays a part in public debate.) 

A healthy airline would, at this point, be making contingency plans and figuring out how to operate profitably within this constraints rather than hoping to win a PR battle.  Watch who decides they have a dog in this fight and then look at their financial performance and labor relations.  It should be an interesting story.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax