The US Department of Transportation has in general had strong support from the halls of Congress of late - especially in the realm of international aviation issues.
In a late March floor speech, Larry Pressler, South Dakota Republican and chairman of the Senate commerce committee, spoke on the benefits of open skies, giving what has to be the most detailed analysis the Senate has ever heard on hub competition for transatlantic traffic going beyond European gateways.
Using a quantitative analysis supplied by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigating arm of Congress, Pressler took France to task for having renounced the aviation bilateral with the US four years ago, a decision that France's secretary for transport, Anne-Marie Idrac, recently said had not made France 'any worse off.'
Au contraire, Pressler intoned. Between 1992 and 1994 passenger traffic growth between France and the US basically stood still while US traffic to the Netherlands increased 38 per cent. This reversal of fortunes, he added, meant the aggregate size of the US-France market was only 60 per cent larger than the US-Netherlands market in 1994 whereas it had been 100 per cent larger in 1991.
More concretely, according to the GAO, it was the connecting traffic that was most affected by the institution of comity and reciprocity between the US and France in mid-1992. Between that year and 1994, US carriers' connecting traffic at Paris airports dropped 55 per cent. All that traffic went elsewhere: US airline connecting traffic grew 24 per cent in Frankfurt, while there was a 329 per cent increase in connections at Amsterdam/Schiphol. No surprises here: this change comes primarily from alliance-building, a trend that Air France has not been able to follow with a US partner, partly because the US DOT would not approve it as long as impediments to US-France open skies exist.
There have been benefits for France, of course: in the years since renunciation, Air France has increased its market share in the US-France market by 8 percentage points, to 39 per cent.
Not to be outdone, Arizona Republican senator John McCain, chairman of the aviation subcommittee, then held hearings during which the UK was lambasted as anti-competitive in its aviation relations with the US. Since 1991, UK carriers have increased their US-UK market share from 50 per cent to roughly 60 per cent, again, according to GAO figures.
The usual anti-UK aviation policy rhetoric ensued, decrying US carriers' very real limitations under Bermuda II. Less talked about was the fact that US airlines have abandoned several services in the past five years (United from Seattle; American from Philadelphia and Nashville; Delta from Miami; and USAir from three cities under its alliance with British Airways).
Also, though the US is somewhat capacity restricted, US players nonetheless can operate larger aircraft on most routes though they choose not to: the average number of seats on BA and Virgin Atlantic aircraft is 305 but US airlines average 254 across the Atlantic.
Source: Airline Business
