Now arriving at EWR, Flightgate
We always thought that airlines picked their routes based on how much money they could make. Now we find out that’s not always the case; it may be based on where some influential public official wants to fly, and when he wants to fly there.
That theory is one of the few plausible explanations for an unprofitable two-day-a-week flight United Airlines launched from Newark Liberty International Airport to Columbia, S.C., not far from where the chairman of the agency that runs the airport had a weekend home.
This week, amid a federal corruption probe and after an internal company investigation, United CEO Jeff Smisek and two other top executives resigned.
The message for fliers? While airlines may treat economy-class passengers like a bunch of sardines and small cities seeking air service like pariahs, they may also be able to find wiggle room to deliver a half-empty non-stop to a town where a big shot weekends.
No one has been indicted or charged with wrongdoing. But federal prosecutors have subpoenaed records to explore whether United launched the route to benefit David Samson, former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the New York-area airports, including Newark.
We’ll leave the legal questions to a federal grand jury. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong that the Newark-Columbia non-stop wasn’t your run-of-themill flight.
The flight, created after Samson became Port Authority chairman, was scheduled twice a week, leaving Newark on Thursday evenings with a return flight Monday morning. During its 19-month life, the 50-seat planes were, on average, just half full. And the route, known as the “chairman’s flight,” was canceled in 2014, just three days after Samson resigned.
While Samson, a former New Jersey attorney general and close ally of Republican Gov. Chris Christie, chaired the Port Authority, United was involved in tough negotiations over improvements at Newark, a key hub.
The Columbia flight might never have come to prosecutors’ attention if not for the federal investigation into what has come to be known as Bridgegate. That juvenile scandal involved Christie aides who allegedly worked with Port Authority officials to shut lanes to the George Washington Bridge, creating an epic traffic jam, to punish a mayor who refused to support Christie.
As scandals go, Bridgegate and now Flightgate are relatively straightforward and easy for the public to grasp, with none of those knotty details about private email servers, State Department rules and what’s classified, as in Hillary Clinton’s controversy.
Nor is the lesson here very complicated: Public officials shouldn’t be accepting favors from companies whose business they influence. And airlines shouldn’t be making the skies friendlier just to curry favor with those public officials.