DAVID FIELD TAMPA
Nowhere was the Federal Aviation Administration's capacity benchmark study taken more seriously than in Tampa Bay, 800 miles from Washington and the site of the Regional Airline Association's annual general meeting.
For the RAA, the report had one overriding implication. It meant that "the spectre of congestion pricing," as association chairman Andy Price called it, hung over the meeting and its 250 participants.
Such pricing would squeeze out regionals from many airports; they simply cannot afford to spread the resultant higher operating costs over the relatively few seats they transport. The result would be that they would be forced to cull flights, with small and rural communities being the first to lose service.
"You just have to remember the realities of the economics of regional airlines," Debbie McElroy, association president, says, adding that most regionals would be forced to operate at off-peak hours, or not at all.
The nascent cries for airport rationing encouraged by the benchmark report led the association into a last-minute charge of lobbying and public strategy.
The RAA had planned to consider backing a Regional Jet Initiative to head off the growing scape-goating of RJs as the principal cause of airport congestion. This public education campaign, supported by manufacturers of airframes and other related equipment, was to be outlined by noted regional airline consultant Doug Abbey of AvStat Associates.
But the association's board and its associate member council decided to transform the plan into the Regional Airline Service Initiative, a programme designed to also include membership's turboprop operators.
Explaining the necessity of the programme, Abbey states that "the benchmarks and the congestion pricing [which the FAA study] has brought to the fore have changed the political climate."
The initiative would use the Internet and other means to educate Congress and local news organisations on the importance of regional airline service and on the danger of losing service to the country's smallest cities.
The association's director of legislative affairs, Faye Malarkey, says that the fight against congestion pricing will be a central lobbying goal of the RAA. She vows to make it "a very hard battle" for the idea's proponents to get peak-hour pricing approved by Congress.
"There are 271 members of Congress who serve communities that would likely lose air flights to congestion pricing," she says, noting that a coalition of representatives and senators from rural states is forming.
Sen Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, and Sen Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have come out in opposition to any congestion pricing that would limit service to sparsely populated states such as theirs. Both sit on the Senate Commerce Committee, which could block such a proposal.
Regional carriers were successful in mounting a challenge to one of the first proposals to combat congestion by imposing differential landing fees, one put forth at Boston's Logan Airport in 1987. However, a fight this time would be different because it is national in scope, according to Cape Air President Dan Wolf.
Among the other main differences between the current situation and that in 1987 is that, because operations between regionals and majors are so much more integrated, it will be hard for majors to allow their smaller partners to be squeezed out.
Sounding an optimistic note, Northwest Airlink Express chief executive Philip Trenary states that congestion pricing "make so little sense that I think it will be defeated." Perhaps, but common sense has rarely helped or hindered regulatory proposals, and the RAA is gearing up for a major campaign.
Source: Airline Business
