Archives For FAA

COVID-19, Ghost Flights, and Emerging Property Rights in Airport Slots

Brent Skorup —  25 March 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Brent Skorup, (Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University).]

One of the most visible economic effects of the COVID-19 spread is the decrease in airline customers. Alec Stapp alerted me to the recent outrage over “ghost flights,” where airlines fly nearly empty planes to maintain their “slots.” 

The airline industry is unfortunately in economic freefall as governments prohibit and travelers pull back on air travel. When the health and industry crises pass, lawmakers will have an opportunity to evaluate the mistakes of the past when it comes to airport congestion and airspace design.

This issue of ghost flights pops up occasionally and offers a lesson in the problems with government rationing of public resources. In this case, the public resource are airport slots: designated times, say, 15 or 30 minutes, a plane may takeoff or land at an airport. (Last week US and EU regulators temporarily waived the use-it-or-lose it rule for slots to mitigate the embarrassing cost and environmental damage caused by forcing airlines to fly empty planes.)

The slots at major hubs at peak times of day are extremely scarce–there’s only so many hours in a day. Today, slot assignment are administratively rationed in a way that favors large, incumbent airlines. As the Wall Street Journal summarized last year,

For decades, airlines have largely divided runway access between themselves at twice-yearly meetings run by the IATA (an airline trade group).

Airport slots are property. They’re valuable. They can be defined, partitioned, leased, put up as collateral, and, in the US, they can be sold and transferred within or between airports.

You just can’t call slots property. Many lawmakers, regulators, and airline representatives refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Stating that slots are valuable public property would make clear the anticompetitive waste that the 40-year slot assignment experiment generates. 

Like many government programs, the slot rationing began in the US as a temporary program decades ago as a response to congestion at New York airports. Slots are currently used to ration access at LGA, JFK, and DCA. And while they don’t use formal slot rationing, the FAA also rations access at four other busy airports: ORD, Newark, LAX, and SFO.

Fortunately, cracks are starting to form. In 2008, at the tailend of the Bush administration, the FAA proposed to auction some slots in New York City’s three airports. The plan was delayed by litigation from incumbent airlines and an adverse finding from the GAO. With a change in administration, the Obama FAA rescinded the plan in 2009.

Before the Obama FAA recission, the mask slipped a bit in the GAO’s criticism of the slot auction plan: 

FAA’s argument that slots are property proves too much—it suggests that the agency has been improperly giving away potentially millions of dollars of federal property, for no compensation, since it created the slot system in 1968.

Gulp.

Though the GAO helped scuttle the plan, the damage has been done. The idea has now entered public policy discourse: giving away valuable public property is precisely what’s going on. 

The implicit was made explicit in 2011 when, despite spiking the Bush FAA plan, the Obama FAA auctioned two dozen high-value slots. (The reversal and lack of controversy is puzzling to me.) Delta and US Airways wanted to swap some 160 slots at New York and DC airports. As a condition of the mega-swap, the Obama FAA required they divest 24 slots at those popular airports, which the agency auctioned to new entrants. Seven low-fare airlines bid in the auction and Jetblue and WestJet won the divested slots, paying about $90 million combined. 

The older fictions are rapidly eroding. There is an active secondary market in slots in some nations and when prices are released it becomes clear that the legacy rationing amounts to public property setasides to insiders. In 2016 it leaked, for instance, that an airline paid £58 million for a pair of take-off and landing slots at Heathrow. Other slot sales are in the tens of millions of dollars.

The 2011 FAA auctions and the loosening of rules globally around slot sales signal that the competition benefits from slot markets are too obvious to ignore. Competition from new entry drives down airfare and increases the number of flights.

For instance, a few months ago researchers used a booking app to scour 50 trillion flight itineraries to see new entrants’ effect on airline ticket prices between 2017 and 2019. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the entry of a low-fare carrier reduced ticket prices by 17% on average. The bigger effect was on output–new entry led to a 30% YoY increase in flights.

It’s becoming harder to justify the legacy view, which allow incumbent airlines to dominate the slot allocations via international conferences and national regulations that require “grandfather” slot usage. In a separate article last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that airlines are reluctantly ceding more power to airports in the assignment of slots. This is another signal in the long-running tug-of-war between airports and airlines. Airports generally want to open slots for new competitors–incumbent airlines do not.

The reason for the change of heart? The Journal says,

Airlines and airports reached the deal in part because of concerns governments should start to sell slots.

Gulp. Ghost flights are a government failure but a rational response to governments withholding the benefits of property from airlines. The slot rationing system encourages flying uneconomical flights, smaller planes, and excess carbon emissions. The COVID-19 crisis allowed the public a glimpse at the dysfunctional system. It won’t be easy, but aviation regulators worldwide need to assess slots policy and airspace access before the administrative rationing system spreads to the emerging urban air mobility and drone delivery markets.

In Corporate & Securities Law, COVID-19, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , ,
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The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail under both economic and First Amendment scrutiny

Geoffrey Manne —  26 April 2015

Last week the International Center for Law & Economics, joined by TechFreedom, filed comments with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in its Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (“UAS” — i.e, drones) proceeding to establish rules for the operation of small drones in the National Airspace System.

We believe that the FAA has failed to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits, as well as the First Amendment implications, of its proposed rules.

The FAA’s proposed drones rules fail to meet (or even undertake) adequate cost/benefit analysis

FAA regulations are subject to Executive Order 12866, which, among other things, requires that agencies:

  • “consider incentives for innovation,”
  • “propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that the benefits of the intended regulation justify its costs”;
  • “base [their] decisions on the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, economic, and other information”; and
  • “tailor [their} regulations to impose the least burden on society,”

The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail to meet these requirements.

An important, and fundamental, problem is that the proposed rules often seem to import “scientific, technical, economic, and other information” regarding traditional manned aircraft, rather than such knowledge specifically applicable to drones and their uses — what FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen has dubbed “The Procrustean Problem with Prescriptive Regulation.”

As such, not only do the rules often not make sense as a practical matter, they also seek to simply adapt existing standards, rules and understandings promulgated for manned aircraft to regulate drones — insufficiently tailoring the rules to “impose the least burden on society.”

In some cases the rules would effectively ban obviously valuable uses outright, disregarding the rules’ effect on innovation (to say nothing of their effect on current uses of drones) without adequately defending such prohibitions as necessary to protect public safety.

Importantly, the proposed rules would effectively prohibit the use of commercial drones for long-distance services (like package delivery and scouting large agricultural plots) and for uses in populated areas — undermining what may well be drones’ most economically valuable uses.

As our comments note:

By prohibiting UAS operation over people who are not directly involved in the drone’s operation, the rules dramatically limit the geographic scope in which UAS may operate, essentially limiting commercial drone operations to unpopulated or extremely sparsely populated areas. While that may be sufficient for important agricultural and forestry uses, for example, it effectively precludes all possible uses in more urban areas, including journalism, broadcasting, surveying, package delivery and the like. Even in nonurban areas, such a restriction imposes potentially insurmountable costs.

Mandating that operators not fly over other individuals not involved in the UAS operation is, in fact, the nail in the coffin of drone deliveries, an industry that is likely to offer a significant fraction of this technology’s potential economic benefit. Imposing such a blanket ban thus improperly ignores the important “incentives for innovation” suggested by Executive Order 12866 without apparent corresponding benefit.

The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail under First Amendment scrutiny

The FAA’s failure to tailor the rules according to an appropriate analysis of their costs and benefits also causes them to violate the First Amendment. Without proper tailoring based on the unique technological characteristics of drones and a careful assessment of their likely uses, the rules are considerably more broad than the Supreme Court’s “time, place and manner” standard would allow.

Several of the rules constitute a de facto ban on most — indeed, nearly all — of the potential uses of drones that most clearly involve the collection of information and/or the expression of speech protected by the First Amendment. As we note in our comments:

While the FAA’s proposed rules appear to be content-neutral, and will thus avoid the most-exacting Constitutional scrutiny, the FAA will nevertheless have a difficult time demonstrating that some of them are narrowly drawn and adequately tailored time, place, and manner restrictions.

Indeed, many of the rules likely amount to a prior restraint on protected commercial and non-commercial activity, both for obvious existing applications like news gathering and for currently unanticipated future uses.

Our friends Eli Dourado, Adam Thierer and Ryan Hagemann at Mercatus also filed comments in the proceeding, raising similar and analogous concerns:

As far as possible, we advocate an environment of “permissionless innovation” to reap the greatest benefit from our airspace. The FAA’s rules do not foster this environment. In addition, we believe the FAA has fallen short of its obligations under Executive Order 12866 to provide thorough benefit-cost analysis.

The full Mercatus comments, available here, are also recommended reading.

Read the full ICLE/TechFreedom comments here.

In Constitutional Law, First Amendment, International Center for Law & Economics, Regulation , , , , , ,
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The Supreme Court upholds freedom of contract in American Express v Italian Colors Restaurant

Thomas McCarthy —  25 June 2013

[The following is a guest post by Thomas McCarthy on the Supreme Court’s recent Amex v. Italian Colors Restaurant decision. Tom is a partner at Wiley Rein, LLP and a George Mason Law grad. He is/was also counsel for, among others,

So he’s had a busy week….]

The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant (June 20, 2013) (“Amex”) is a resounding victory for freedom-of-contract principles.  As it has done repeatedly in recent terms (see AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion (2011); Marmet Health Care Center, Inc. v. Brown (2012)), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) makes arbitration “a matter of contract,” requiring courts to “rigorously enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms.”  Amex at 3.  In so doing, it rejected the theory that class procedures must remain available to claimants in order to ensure that they have sufficient financial incentive to prosecute federal statutory claims of relatively low value.  Consistent with the freedom-of-contract principles enshrined in the FAA, an arbitration agreement must be enforced—even if the manner in which the parties agreed to arbitrate leaves would-be claimants with low-value claims that are not worth pursuing.

In Amex, merchants who accept American Express cards filed a class action against Amex, asserting that Amex violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by “us[ing] its monopoly power in the market for charge cards to force merchants to accept credit cards at rates approximately 30% higher than the fees for competing credit cards.”  Amex at 1-2.  And, of course, the merchants sought treble damages for the class under Section 4 of the Clayton Act.  Under the terms of their agreement with American Express, the merchants had agreed to resolve all disputes via individual arbitration, that is, without the availability of class procedures.  Consistent with that agreement, American Express moved to compel individual arbitration, but the merchants countered that the costs of expert analysis necessary to prove their antitrust claims would greatly exceed the maximum recovery for any individual plaintiff, thereby precluding them from effectively vindicating their federal statutory rights under the Sherman Act.  The Second Circuit sided with the merchants, holding that the prohibitive costs the merchants would face if they had to arbitrate on an individual basis rendered the class-action waiver in the arbitration agreement unenforceable.

In a 5-3 majority (per Justice Scalia), the Supreme Court reversed.  The Court began by highlighting the Federal Arbitration Act’s freedom-of-contract mandate—that “courts must rigorously enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms, including terms that specify with whom [the parties] choose to arbitrate their disputes, and the rules under which that arbitration will be conducted.”  Amex at 2-3 (internal quotations and citations omitted).  It emphasized that this mandate applies even to federal statutory claims, “unless the FAA’s mandate has been overridden by a contrary congressional command.”  Amex at 3 (internal quotations and citations omitted).  The Court then briefly explained that no contrary congressional command exists in either the federal antitrust laws or Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which allows for class actions in certain circumstances).

Next, the Court turned to the merchants’ principal argument—that the arbitration agreement should not be enforced because enforcing it (including its class waiver provision) would preclude plaintiffs from effectively vindicating their federal statutory rights.  The Court noted that this “effective vindication” exception “originated as dictum” in prior cases and that the Court has only “asserted [its] existence” without ever having applied it in any particular case.  Amex at 6.  The Court added that this exception grew out of a desire to prevent a “prospec­tive waiver of a party’s right to pursue statutory reme­dies,” explaining that it “would certainly cover a provision in an arbitration agreement forbidding the assertion of certain statutory rights.”  The Court added that this exception might “perhaps cover filing and administrative fees attached to arbitration that are so high as to make access to the forum impracticable,” Amex at 6, but emphasized that, whatever the scope of this exception, the fact that the manner of arbitration the parties contracted for might make it “not worth the expense” to pursue a statutory remedy “does not constitute the elimination of the right to pursue that remedy.”  Amex at 7.

The Court closed by noting that its previous decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion “all but resolves this case.”  Amex at 8.  In Concepcion, the Court had invalidated a state law “conditioning enforcement of arbitration on the availability of class procedures because that law ‘interfere[d] with fundamental attributes of arbitration.’”   As the Court explained, Concepcion specifically rejected the argument “that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’” thus establishing “that the FAA’s command to enforce arbitration agreements trumps any interest in ensuring the prosecution of low value claims.”  Amex at 9 (quoting Concepcion).  The Court made clear that, under the FAA, courts are to hold parties to the deal they struck—arbitration pursuant to the terms of their arbitration agreements, even if that means that certain claims may go unprosecuted.  Responding to a dissent penned by Justice Kagan, who complained that the Court’s decision would lead to “[l]ess arbitration,” contrary to the pro-arbitration policies of the FAA, Amex dissent at 5, the Court doubled down on this point, emphasizing that the FAA “favor[s] the absence of litigation when that is the consequence of a class-action waiver, since its ‘principal purpose’ is the enforcement of arbitration agreements according to their terms.”  Amex at 9 n.5 (emphasis added).

By holding parties to the deal they struck regarding the resolution of their disputes, the Court properly vindicates the FAA’s freedom-of-contract mandates.  And even assuming the dissenters are correct that there will be less arbitration in individual instances, the opposite is true on a macro level.  For where there is certainty in contract enforcement, parties will enter into contracts.  Amex thus should promote arbitration by eliminating uncertainty in contracting and thereby removing a barrier to swift and efficient resolution of disputes.

In Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Regulation, Supreme Court, Telecommunications, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , ,
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