Mayor Pete and the FAA Plan Higher Fares
To alleviate air-traffic woes, the government proposes to commit an antitrust offense.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., WSJ
March 28, 2023 6:21 pm ET
It’s not a great sign when airline executives complain about a “lack of engagement” from top Biden administration officials over what is shaping up to be another summer of air-travel turmoil.
On the proposed JetBlue and Spirit Airlines merger, the Justice Department has apparently been little open to discussion—unlike Florida, which reached an agreement with the two carriers despite having the most to lose if the deal were really as anticompetitive as the federal government says.
Airline operators also say they struggle to get the attention of top Biden officials on traffic delays and congestion. Only last week the Federal Aviation Administration came clean on staffing problems at its New York-area traffic center, routinely scrounging up 54% of the needed workers. The agency wants to move 30 controllers from Long Island to Philadelphia but has been stymied for more than a year by Sen. Chuck Schumer and organized labor. The effort, says Long Island’s Newsday, is actually part of an on-again, off-again “realignment” that has been stalled since 2007.
The result: The FAA last week called on carriers to cut flights 10% this summer in the busy New York region to accommodate its controller shortage, virtually guaranteeing higher fares and fewer choices. Yes, the Biden administration is committing the antitrust sin it accuses JetBlue and Spirit of.
Washington offers no hoarier tale than the FAA’s struggles with modernization. London City Airport now has a digital control tower allowing personnel to be used far more efficiently. Canada’s system has been commercially self-funding since 1996 and speedily incorporates new technology. The U.S. still relies on radar operators handing slips of paper to each other.
Reforming air-traffic control would actually be the best way to enhance competition. Fuel costs and delays would be lessened. Carriers could more quickly deploy planes wherever price signals dictate.
Putting Mr. Buttigieg in charge of the U.S. Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, was one of President Biden’s more interesting experiments. But Project Pete isn’t going well. Near misses at airports, apparently due to the post-Covid introduction of thousands of less-experienced workers, are being addressed the only way the system can: by slowing things down and aggravating customers.
January’s FAA software meltdown that halted traffic across the country happened on Mr. Buttigieg’s watch. He can’t be blamed for Southwest’s epic scheduling mishaps in December, but neither has he shown any great desire to leave a mark on the overstretched air-transport system before he moves on to something else.
The problem is clearly more systemic than anecdotal. Witness the Senate failure Tuesday of the administration’s FAA nominee, Phil Washington, who lacked aviation experience except a single year running the Denver airport, overseeing concessions and amenities. His previous 20 years were spent in public transit in Denver and Los Angeles, where he remains embroiled in an investigation over a no-bid contract for a sexual harassment hotline allegedly granted to a political ally.
The character of the Biden administration is coming into focus. In 1993, Vice President Al Gore, as part of his Reinventing Government initiative, attempted a root-and-branch reform of the air traffic control system and succeeded—his idea was adopted in Canada. Donald Trump strove to revive the plan for the U.S. but was thwarted by a pork-barreling Congress.
Team Biden, in contrast, apparently lacks any managerial ambition at all, except to spend as much money as possible with decorative language to appeal to the left.
One of the genuine services the U.S. government provides the economy is air-traffic control. Mr. Buttigieg, a former McKinsey consultant, might have been an appointee to try doing something with his tenure besides being a ticket puncher who provides a path to advancement for other ticket punchers.
Equally devoid of substantive ambition are Biden trustbusters. JetBlue and Spirit make a reasonable case that their deal would create more competition against the four giants that account for 80% of the domestic air-travel market. Their merger is remarkably unopposed by economists except a few cultists who long for 1978’s deregulation to be undone.
Justice’s opposition seems mainly a matter of adhering to an anti-merger bias the administration has adopted to appease progressives. Permeating its case is an unrealistically static notion of airline competition: Though airplanes are highly mobile assets, competitors somehow won’t descend on routes where fares go up if JetBlue and Spirit no longer are rivals.
Mr. Biden during a long career earned a reputation for loquaciousness in the Senate. Fifty years of not having any job outside politics wouldn’t make a manager out of most of us. But the U.S. government could still use some managing. The lack of it is likely to be apparent to Americans during the summer travel season.
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