Airlines write letters to the US Department of Transportation over all kinds of things. Sometimes they're dozens of pages long, so you'd think they'd be super boring. Nope. As it turns out, airline lawyers are often extremely entertaining characters who love to throw shade at their competitors, and that often comes through in these letters.…
Continue reading: LOVE: JetBlue DOT Filing Details United’s Hypocrisy
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
The ME guys are all transit/connection carriers, while the Chinese ones are home-based and ferrying enormous numbers of people (and growing). If China wasn’t a boom market for air travel then the US legacies would be all up in arms.
Tl;dr - Chinese economic weight keeps US legacies quiet.
In their ongoing need to urgently seek funding for their overleveraged properties that might to go into default, convicted felon Charlie Kushner and his son Jared apparently pushed the blockade of Qatar -- bizarre enough, given that Qatar is host of the biggest US base in the Mideast -- leading to the well-chronicled Qatari flight paths reroutes.
But they somehow didn't threaten Qatar's landing rights in the US.
Oh well, why seek logical explanations from the illogical....
@ADP , brilliant point! there is a fundamental difference between Chinese airlines or US airlines vs. ME3. The former are all national airlines in nature while the latter intended to be international airlines which break current business models.
@ ADP -- I'm curious, is the issue exclusively that they're mostly carrying transit passengers, is the issue that they're state owned, or is the issue that you perceive they lose money? Because I agree China is carrying mostly local traffic, but I also believe Chinese airlines are mostly losing money and are government owned. If the objection is exclusively that they are mostly carrying international transit passengers, I can think of plenty of other carriers besides Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar where that's the case. And that's my issue with the argument by American, Delta, and United -- they're arbitrarily targeting three airlines.
United and Air China are partners
If traffic rights are given UA CA can benefit each other through cooperation and offering connections at IAH
Passengers can fly Panama - IAH on CA and connect to UA’s domestic and international network.
I assume CA and UA have a fare and SPA agreement, and they already have reciprocal lounge and frequent flier benefits etc etc
If Delta decided to fly from Amsterdam or Paris to Delhi one can be sure there would be no objections - they would cooperate with their partners
On the other hand if emirates flew to Panama via Houston it would be competition however they wouldn’t benefit from fare and other reciprocity
Jet blue is talking BS
UA and CA cannot discuss a fare and schedule alignment (which is basically a JV). US DOT prohibits JV without Open Skies.
The key difference here is the fifth freedom is of operational necessity. The tag allows Air China to serve Panama City where it could not reach there directly otherwise. The purpose of the flight is for China to Panama City with some local Houston traffic to support the flight. The purpose of the Emirates Athens to Newark flight was not to serve Newark to Dubai but to capture the New York/NJ to Athens market as they already have plenty of JFK services already.
Other services that likely have originated for historical services that are mostly O&D as there are now non-stop options to skip the tag include China Airlines (NRT-HNL) and Cathay's YVR-JFK. Although for Cathay you can argue the HKG-YVR-JFK routing allows for timings that would not be possible with a non-stop.
I personally would love to see full deregulation of the US domestic market to allow foreign carriers to operate domestic flights in the US. Can you imagine if Emirates or others operates coast to coast in the US? Can you imagine JetBlue supporting that? No
@Icarus, in short, UA also benefits from this arrangement hence they keep mum about it.
The fight with ME3 and their government “subsidies” is more about the vastly superior product offered by the ME3 over the legacy US3. If the ME3 were all of the same caliber of Kuwait Airlines no one would be complaining because no one would be losing high revenue customers to such an airline. The legacy US3 need to step up their game and compete on product rather than continuing to chant the new Doug Parker AA mantra, ‘f*** it, it’s good enough’
This is a nice tongue-in-cheek jab [at United] by JetBlue, ha.
Okay, and now a little one for you, Lucky. It seems you are the only boardingarea.com blogger who has no link-back to the main parent site on your blog. What did you do to become so special? 🙂
^^^
Edit: Never mind my jabber, Lucky, your blog actually has that little tab [to Boarding Area] at the bottom-right of the page. Very interesting/unique web page implementation.
That was amusing, but you hyped it up such that there was no way it could live up to expectations.
@Lucky - In a world where governments view their airlines as tools of national policy and act to support them in one way or another, the salivating prospect of enormous revenue from the noveau riche Chinese is enough to sway the business calculus of the legacies in favoring keeping quiet - they just want a piece of that pie.
The ME folks (aside from maybe Turkey and Iran) can only use plane orders as aviation-related political chits. It’s interesting to note that after UA’s Dr. Dao debacle, Mr. Munoz flew to China to help smooth matters over - especially given Dr. Dao wasn’t even of Chinese heritage.
It always come down to how much potential business one can get. With China, you have billions of customers. With ME, well, not so much. US3 can afford to offend the ME customers because much smaller and fragmented customer base (and frankly why would they even want to fly on crappy US3 airplanes anyway). China, on the other hand, has US3 flashing dollar (RMB) signs in their eyes. Plus China has a lot more political capital than the ME countries. With US pumping out so much oil and soon to be energy independent, ME countries have a lot less leverage with US government.
Was waiting to see if David Dao pops up. Lmfao, we do have a conspiracy theory.
Entertainment? Thanks for saying the truth! Maybe some people will finally realize the charade going on behind the US3!
Rob hit the nail on the head with his March 7th post. The issue with the ME3 is that they have unlimited funds from their governments to pour into services and products that are out of reach for airlines that are subject to normal financial and operational principles. The As such, the Chinese carriers do not fall into the same category as the ME3.
When I lived it DC it was near the DOT headquarters and the big three US carriers plastered our metro station (Navy Yard) with anti-ME3 billboards for months on end during 2015-16. Needless to say I was really tired of seeing sad but patriotic pilots claiming their jobs were being jeopardized by the evil ME3. I was thrilled when they finally took them down for someone else's campaign. Also, I started walking to Eastern Market most days. That's mostly because the green line sucks at rush hour, not to avoid the ads, but it did have that added benefit.
Just curious... where do you find these filings? I was looking for them on the DOT but don't know where they are
Thanks!