Podcast on the FAA reauthorization collapse
Posted in Evan's News and Quick Takes, tagged congress, faa, misc. on May 8, 2008 | No Comments »
I recently recorded a podcast with Addison Schonland of IAG. Click here to listen!
Posted in Evan's News and Quick Takes, tagged congress, faa, misc. on May 8, 2008 | No Comments »
I recently recorded a podcast with Addison Schonland of IAG. Click here to listen!
Posted in Evan's News and Quick Takes, tagged congress, faa on May 6, 2008 | No Comments »
At 2:30, the Senate voted down a cloture motion on the FAA reauthorization bill amendments offered by Senator Jay Rockefeller (see here). Majority Leader Harry Reid deployed a procedural tactic to prevent any amendments he didn’t approve, and, as promised, Republicans mustered forty-two votes (two more than necessary) to keep the Senate from ending debate [...]
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged congress, europe, green, regulation, usa on May 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The House Aviation Subcommittee is holding a hearing today on the environmental impact of aviation, especially emissions. I won’t be able to cover the entire session, but I’ll give you what I can.
Representative Jerry Costello (D-Ill.) offers his opening statement. He emphasizes that the need to reduce emissions is a corollary of the need to [...]
Posted in Evan's News and Quick Takes, tagged congress, faa, humor, misc., travel on May 6, 2008 | No Comments »
The Senate amendments to the FAA reauthorization bill include Section 714, which updates the law on “transporting musical instruments,” which is clearly an important issue for our elected representatives. I bet you’re on tenterhooks waiting to read this groundbreaking legislation. Here are some highlights from among the bureaucratic tedium:
“An air carrier providing air transportation shall [...]
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged american, congress, continental, delta, faa, labor, network airlines, northwest on May 6, 2008 | No Comments »
The House’s version of the FAA reauthorization bill has been on the Senate floor for the past few weeks, but it’s currently stalled (although scheduled for a cloture vote today, May 6, which if passed would move it forward for consideration by the full Senate without more amendments or if lost would hold up the [...]
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged competition, congress, delta, Merger Mania 2008, mergers, northwest on April 24, 2008 | No Comments »
Notes: I am leaving out redundant passages, which often occur in congressional hearings. Unless something is in quotation marks, it is a paraphrase of what a speaker is saying. Editorial comments are so noted.
The antitrust task force of the House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing to assess airline competition and the proposed merger between [...]
Posted in Evan's News and Quick Takes, tagged congress, delta, Merger Mania 2008, northwest on April 21, 2008 | No Comments »
Delta CEO Richard Anderson and Northwest CEO Doug Steenland will be on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify before the following congressional panels:
House Judiciary Committee, Antitrust Task Force, April 24, 10:30 a.m., Rayburn 2141.
Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, April 24, 2:00 p.m., Dirksen 226.
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged congress, delta, Merger Mania 2008, mergers, northwest on April 15, 2008 | No Comments »
Congress may usually cleave along party lines, but it often divides along local lines as well. We are seeing this bipartisan and narrow parochialism in congressmen’s response to the news of the Delta-Northwest merger. Congress is dividing along regional lines of business interest in support of or opposition to the tie-up. The dynamics of the [...]
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged congress, delays, faa, network airlines, safety, southwest, Southwest and the FAA, usa on April 11, 2008 | 2 Comments »
As I’ve written before, the failure of the FAA in the Southwest Airlines case and elsewhere seems to stem from a personnel problem. The safety inspection chain of command at the agency ignored and abetted an inspector who was consistently neglecting policies and procedures. This is not an indictment of the FAA’s collaborative approach to [...]
Posted in Evan's Commentary, tagged congress, faa, regulation, safety, Southwest and the FAA on April 7, 2008 | 6 Comments »
On Thursday night I posted the narrative that emerged about the Southwest Airlines-FAA maintenance debacle. Now I’d like to post some of my observations and offer some policy lessons from the April 3 hearing. You should read the Thursday post before you look at this one.
The “collaborative” relationship between airlines and regulators doesn’t have to [...]