Delta-Northwest is a go: Justice Department

The Justice Department announced today that its Antitrust Division has found that “the proposed merger between Delta and Northwest is likely to produce substantial and credible efficiencies that will benefit U.S. consumers and is not likely to substantially lessen competition.” This clears the way for Delta and Northwest to merge officially. It was not an [...]

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Listen to the Airplane Geeks podcast

Can’t get enough of the Aviation Policy Blog? Want to listen to me geek out and generally make a fool of myself for an hour? Then listen to this week’s Airplane Geeks Podcast! We talk a lot about the thirtieth anniversary of deregulation, but we touch on a number of other matters, too.
Thanks to Max [...]

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Boris Johnson’s silly idea. This is news? (And more)

Lots in the news today. . . .

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, wants to build a new London airport on an island and in the frickin’ North Sea. Seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I love BoJo, but this is taking a perennial white elephant and turning it into white whale. Or something like that. [...]

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Friday fun: Mary Worth dreads the TSA, too!

One of the blogs I read for fun is the Comics Curmudgeon, whose author, Josh Fruhlinger, has a love/hate relationship with the daily funnies (or not-so-funnies). Today, Mary Worth — a comic I shunned as boring in my childhood, only later to realize that it is boring for adults, too — takes on airport security [...]

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What’s wrong with commercial aviation?

My story in The American magazine is now up on its website. Here’s the lede: “Thirty years ago this October, the era of affordable mass air travel was unleashed. Why was this revolution stalled, and what can be done to finish it?”

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Obama, McCain advisers on transportation issues

Top policy advisers to Barack Obama and John McCain differed on key transportation issues at a forum in Washington this morning, but they agreed, in the words of McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, when it comes to transportation, “the ratio of importance to discussion on the campaign trail is high.”
Mortimer Downey, Obama’s senior transportation adviser and [...]

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Security theater, congressional intervention, and more

Here’s your daily briefing on aviation policy news:

In the handsomely redesigned November issue of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg exposes the uselessness of airport security. He carried tons of forbidden items onto planes and lots of not-forbidden but suspicion-arousing paraphernalia as well. Since much of it seems targeted at making us feel safe, articles like this [...]

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McCain and Obama speak out on general aviation

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association have released the candidates’ answers (or, more accurately, the campaigns’ answers) to their election questionnaire. One of the interesting points about this questionnaire is that even though John McCain has not articulated an aviation agenda, he/his campaign can draw on his Commerce Committee experience to answer these questions pointedly [...]

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Exotic new airline offers one-way flights only

The Wall Street Journal today profiles ICE Air, an airline with service to exotic destinations like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, Indonesia, and Cambodia. It offers leather seats with custom headrests and in-flight service with box lunches. The forty-pound checked baggage allowance is not enforced. It also has high load factors: “We are making a [...]

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A bad start

Just started reading a new report, “Plane Truths,” that I came across through John Macilree’s blog. I’ll write more later, after I’ve finished it, but I’m already put off by the motto of the “think-and-do tank” that produced it: “Economics as if people and the planet mattered.” You know, as opposed to those think tanks [...]

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