Three decades of deregulated commercial flight has democratized America's skies, increasing competition and lowering air fares so those who never would have indulged in pleasure flight a generation ago can wing it to Florida on a moment's notice.
But try finding a passenger who has something good to say about U.S. air travel.
"I don't know anyone who's happy," said Alfred Moye, a retired Hewlett-Packard Co. executive who regularly travels through Pittsburgh from his home near San Francisco for duties as a trustee at two local universities.
Thirty years ago this Friday, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Airline Deregulation Act, ending the era in which the federal government treated commercial aviation as a public utility. The Civil Aeronautics Board, in place since the Great Depression to guard against "cut-throat competition," according to the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, ceased setting fares and routes and guaranteeing a return on investment.
"Deregulation has been good by all measures for the customers," said David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents airlines. "The number of communities with nonstop service and connections through hubs is hundreds more than in the regulated environment. The choices that passengers have today are far greater."
David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, believes deregulation helped air travel to become akin to mass transit, allowing low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines -- which operated only in Texas before 1978 -- and others such as Jet Blue and AirTran to expand services enormously to cities nationwide.
"Up until the recent oil crisis, more passengers were flying to more places at lower prices than before deregulation," he said.
But Moye doubts the benefits of deregulation to airline workers and, in turn, the service that depleted workforce provides to passengers. He recalled a lost-baggage incident that left him interviewing a prospective university president minus a shave, wearing the jeans, t-shirt and sneakers he traveled in a day earlier.
"Price is not the only thing we need to look at," he said. "There's got to be a point at which service to the public is factored in. It should not be a crapshoot."
Passengers are not alone in questioning the wisdom of deregulation. Bob Crandall, the outspoken CEO of American Airlines from 1985 to 1998, urged the government earlier this year to limit flights out of congested cities and to invest more in infrastructure.
"Market-based approaches alone have not and will not produce the aviation system our country needs," he said.
The airlines have lurched from crisis to crisis, hobbled in some cases by expansion plans, recessions in the early 1980s and '90s, the cataclysm of 9/11 and skyrocketing oil prices.
Every pre-deregulation "legacy" carrier operating has filed for bankruptcy protection, with the exception of American. Pittsburgh's once-dominant US Airways has done so twice. With those bankruptcies came large-scale losses of middle-class jobs, with workers left behind facing slashed wages, benefits and pensions. Oil's summer spike to $147 a barrel prompted airlines to pull out of dozens of small communities.
Paul Dempsey, director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal, said he supported deregulation when he was a young lawyer at the Civil Aeronautics Board in the 1970s. His view has changed.
"The U.S. aviation industry is a financial basket case," he said. Airlines have had few profitable years, losing $40 billion since 2001 because of fare wars with competitors.
"This industry cannot behave rationally without some kind of managed competition," he said. "Like the financial industry, this is another that has suffered mightily from deregulation."
He disputes the notion that deregulation drove down fares, saying they declined faster during the regulated era, because establishing the hub-and-spoke system that replaced point-to-point flying initially was costly. Other studies have shown that air fares globally declined over the same period.
Deregulation -- and the many airline mergers and consolidations that followed -- has been no friend to workers, unions say.
"Airline pilots today work many more hours for a lot less money," said James Ray, spokesman for the US Airline Pilots Association, an independent union representing US Airways pilots. After the carrier's two reorganizations in bankruptcy court, "I lost half my pay and my pension."
But Castelveter doubts that more government control is the solution.
The same government that deregulation critics say could stabilize the industry is the entity that has failed to address a major problem facing the traveling public: congestion, particularly around New York City's airports, Castelveter said. Delays there ripple throughout the system.
"It's this government that has not kept up with the demand for air travel," he said. "We have an air traffic control system that was born in the 1950s. It's radar-based in an environment where people have satellite-based GPS in their cars."
Congressional funding has been scarce for the next generation global positioning system that would allow planes to safely fly within closer proximity to one another, and to touch down from more directions than allowed. The Air Traffic Control Association, a trade group of controllers and manufacturers of equipment and aircraft, said it doesn't expect all aircraft and airports to be upgraded until 2025.
To deal with congestion, the Federal Aviation Administration this monthannounced it would begin auctioning some takeoff and landing slots during peak hours at John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark-Liberty airports. Castelveter's group and some members of Congress vehemently oppose the decision, saying airlines will pass on costs to travelers and reduce the number of flights to small or mid-sized cities.
Smaller towns have lost service because of high fuel prices. Locally, an initiative tentatively called The Pennsylvania Connection is seeking non-legacy carriers to bring point-to-point service between Pittsburgh and such towns as Harrisburg, Latrobe and Johnstown.
Even with lost service, said Roger Cohen, president of the Regional Airline Association, travelers leaving from small airports have benefited from deregulation. New regional jets operate under federal safety standards, not a patchwork of state regulations for tiny turbo-props.
"Service is now seamless," he said. "Before, they'd buy a ticket on a small commuter plane, get off, get their bags, recheck their bags. They'd have to buy two tickets.
"An entire generation of American consumers got an incredible deal," Cohen added. "The issue going forward is, Can this business sustain itself over the long term? At $140-per-barrel oil, the answer was clearly no. You can't have it all."
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