America’s airline service is collapsing fast, and businesses across Heartland America are taking the brunt of the hit. A new article in the Washington Monthly by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan explains what’s happening and why the problem is rooted in the same kind of policies that brought on the financial crisis.
As America’s few remaining airlines slash their routes to pay off debt, cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Memphis are finding themselves cut off from the rest of America and the world. Some have lost more than half their air service in a few short years — and have found they are all but powerless to alter the decisions of distant airline executives and financiers.
Many of these cities are home to Fortune 500 companies, major employers that depend on frequent and efficient service. As the heartland’s airline network dies off, those companies are beginning to pack up and leave, taking thousands of jobs with them. As Longman and Khan report, Chiquita recently moved its headquarters out of Cincinnati precisely because it has become so difficult to fly executives in and out of Ohio.
Most surprising is the culprit. For years experts have blamed higher fuel prices. But Longman and Khan show the problem stems from the so-called “deregulation” of the industry more than 30 years ago. The time has come to recognize that this policy — first promoted in the 1970s by Ralph Nader, Ted Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer, and embraced by conservatives — has failed, and that without a new system of federal airline regulation, America’s heartland cities will be shut out of the global economy.
Read “Terminal Sickness.”
