Airlines fight DOT plan to boost peak-hour landing fees at congested airports

Airlines are up in arms over the Transportation Department’s latest idea for fixing the problem of delays at congested airports. DOT has proposed changes in the existing rules to give airports greater flexibility in the ways they assess landing fees. Specifically, the agency said it wants airports to be able to “provide incentives to air carriers to use the airport at less congested times or to use alternate airports to meet regional air service needs.” Those incentives are actually disincentives – in the form of higher landing fees – for airlines to schedule flights during peak periods at congested airports. Such fees could lead airlines to adjust their schedules accordingly, or to schedule ore flights to other airports in the region that are underutilized, DOT said. The agency also suggested that airports could base landing fees on a combination of aircraft weight and number of flight operations, encouraging airlines to operate fewer flights with larger planes.

The Transportation Department has already shown it means business about the flight delay situation by its recent decision to impose a flight operations cap during busy hours at New York’s JFK Airport and at Newark Airport. The proposal to allow new kinds of landing fee calculations is aimed at the nation’s 35 busiest airports, which collectively handle 73 percent of U.S. passenger traffic.

The Air Transport Association, representing the nation’s airlines, blasted the DOT plan as “nothing more than congestion pricing disguised as an airport fee. Unfortunately, that does nothing to fix the primary cause of delays – our nation’s increasingly antiquated air traffic control system,” ATA said. The group predicted that higher landing fees during busy periods “will only increase the cost of flying for the consumer.”

If the DOT plan does go into effect, the big question for travelers would be: Will airlines offset the higher cost by spreading it out systemwide with general fare increases? Or will they adopt a user-based approach, raising fares only on those flights that have to pay the increased landing fees? The latter approach could contribute to a market-based solution if it leads to a shift in demand, encouraging passengers to book flights during non-peak periods to avoid the higher fares, or to book flights that use alternate airports where the higher fees aren’t imposed.