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 [...]
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“. . . wrote St. Paul, ‘but not all things are profitable.’ And so it is with the proposed merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines.”
My new op-ed on the Delta-Northwest merger is up on American.com.
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Joke circulating among Northwest pilots: “They’re going to incorporate elements of both corporate identities in the merger. From Delta, we get ‘Delta.’ From Northwest, we get ‘Airlines.’”
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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 [...]
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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.
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From Mike Boyd’s weekly update:
7,100+
Based on an independent Airports:USA analysis, the number of overlapping markets technically represented by the merger of Delta and Northwest, defined as city pairs where a consumer can possibly book either carrier.
14
Out of the top 100 overlapping markets, the number (other than routes connecting existing DL/NW hubs) where the combined market [...]
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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 [...]
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The press conference is streaming live at www.newglobalairline.com. It got started about 10 minutes late.
Richard Anderson (Delta CEO): this is a financially powerful merger. Also: it’s especially necessary due to record-high fuel prices. He claims Delta-NWA will be “better able to handle the volatility of fuel” than as standalone carriers. Transaction creates over “6,000 new [...]
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Merger Mania 2008 is back and kicking. Delta and Northwest have announced their merger plan. See this Bloomberg story for more. I’ll have more on this later, but for now, you can look back at my overview of the DL-NW antitrust issues. After the failure of the two airlines’ pilot groups to agree on a [...]
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BREAKING NEWS: Delta and Northwest’s pilot groups were unable to come to agreement about a merged seniority list. Delta MEC chairman Lee Moak announced the breakdown of negotiations today in a letter to Delta pilots. Without a merged seniority list, a merger might still go through (companies can force master seniority list mergers, as I’ve [...]
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