Will Airlines Like the Disappearance of the Perimeter Rule in Washington?

In one of his first acts back in the Senate, Senator John McCain has decided to tackle the perimeter rules in Washington and New York. In short, there are rules in place limiting flights from Washington/National airport to 1,250 miles away and from New York/LaGuardia to 1,500 miles away. If you want, you can learn more about perimeter rules and their quirky exemptions. But what you really need to know is that McCain wants them gone.

As you can imagine, different airlines will likely have different opinions on these rules. If I had to guess, this is how I’d imagine they would all fall out in regards to Washington/National. (None of these are official positions. These are simply how I would feel were I in their positions.) Tomorrow, I’ll have my thoughts on New York/LaGuardia.

• Supporters of Eliminating the Rule
  • US Airways has long been an opponent of the rule, and as a constituent in McCain’s home state, they’ve been able to acquire some of the exemptions to fly west. But they have a lot of slots at the airport and I’m sure they would like to use some of those to fly west.
  • Delta is similar to US Airways in that it has a fair number of slots at National and limited operations at the other area airports. By opening up National, Delta could fly more to its Salt Lake hub or to the west coast where it might be able to compete.
  • American has a slightly larger operation at Dulles to compete with United on west coast flights, but opening up National would give them much greater footing to stand on. They probably wouldn’t be as supportive as the above two, but anything that helps them compete with United would probably be welcome.
  • AirTran is an airline I thought about for awhile. They do have an operation at Baltimore that this might cannibalize a little, but I think they might find greater opportunity with the ability to fly longer distances, if they so chose. I don’t see a huge benefit for them in having the rule in place, so while they may fall more neutral, they probably wouldn’t mind it going away.
• Opponents of Eliminating the Rule
  • There’s no question that the big loser in this would be United. They have a hub at Dulles and they own most of the west coast routes from there. By opening National, they could fly nonstop to the west coast, but so could many other airlines. And United doesn’t have a ton of slots at National so they wouldn’t be able to win the frequency game. I have to think they wouldn’t support this.
  • I would think that Alaska wouldn’t support this rule either. Right now, Alaska has exemptions to fly from National to both Seattle and Los Angeles once daily, and they’re the only airline that has it. There’s very little doubt that they’d lose exclusivity on the LA route if the rule were lifted, so they don’t stand to benefit here at all.
• Indifferent to the Rule
  • Continental doesn’t have much of a presence at any of the DC airports, but they have enough slots to adequately fly to all their hubs. They don’t have much to gain or lose, as far as I can tell.
  • Southwest might want to build a big operation at National, but they have no slots right now and the prospects of gaining a big number of them are slim. Besides, if they received slots, they probably wouldn’t use them on the long haul flying unless they received a ton of slots and that’s unlikely without an existing airline’s failure.