Low-fare and foreign airlines fret over access to New York JFK

As the federal government continues pondering how to best reduce flight congestion at New York’s crowded JFK Airport, small domestic carriers and foreign airlines are worried that the big U.S. carriers might use lobbying clout to restrict their access there. The Coalition of Smaller Airlines, a group that includes AirTran, Virgin America, Spirit, Frontier, MAXjet and other low-cost carriers, charged that the nation’s “large major airlines” are pressuring the Transportation Department to set a ceiling on flight operations at JFK, giving grandfather rights to existing operations and “shutting out new entrants, forcing smaller airlines to not only pay for rights the incumbent carriers got for free, but to rely on the incumbent competitors to sell slots to them.” Meanwhile, the director general of the International Air Transport Association, which represents world airlines, met with Transportation Secretary Mary Peters last week. According to the trade journal Air Transport World, IATA DG Giovanni Bisignani strongly urged Peters not to adopt flight caps and “congestion pricing” at JFK – i.e., charging airlines more to operate there during peak periods. To do so, he said, could invite retaliation by foreign governments. He said that airport congestion pricing has been tried and “has failed in a long list of countries.”