DOT Denies Virgin America Request for Confidentiality

It was more than six months ago that we last checked in on the Virgin America vs DOT saga. Virgin America had requested confidentiality for its traffic information, lost, and then appealed the decision. The appeal was finally denied today, and the information will be released to the public on “the second business day following the service date.” I assume today is the service date, so we should see the information by Friday, just in time for a long weekend of number-crunching.

The DOT dismissed many of Virgin America’s arguments under the appeal by saying that they were out of the scope of the original ruling. If Virgin America wants to try to fight this battle against public disclosure on a broader scale, they’ll need to propose a Petition for Rulemaking and not use the appeal system.

But on the relevant objections, the department found no merit to the airline’s appeal. In fact, to sum things up, I’ll see Steven Smith, Deputy Director, Bureau of Transportation Statistics take it away:

I have reviewed the appeal of the staff action denying Virgin America’s motions for confidential treatment and considered all documents properly filed in DOT Docket OST-2008-0107. I find that Virgin America did not present any additional evidence to demonstrate a likelihood that
Virgin America would suffer substantial competitive harm from the release of certain Form 41
financial, traffic, and O&D data submitted to the DOT. Based on my review of the record in
Docket 0107, I am affirming the staff action in this matter because I did not find a compelling
justification for overturning the original denial of Virgin America’s motions for confidential treatment.

Bam. Looks like we’ll be getting a much better sense of how Virgin America is doing within the next few days.