DOT Due To Make Decision Soon, Possibly By End Of Month

New, highly lucrative, and rare air routes to China -- established by trade talks between that country and the US -- are being opened... and competition between the contenders is getting ugly.

Delta Air Lines filed thousands of pages of documents with the US Department of Transportation to bolster its bid to begin a route from its Atlanta hub to Shanghai. The airline also took the opportunity to tear down rival bids, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

But the other contenders -- Continental Airlines, United Airlines, Northwest Airlines and American Airlines -- responded in kind. American contends the Atlanta/Beijing route is a "high-risk experimental gateway."

The DOT is due to render a decision very soon, possibly by the end of the month, according to a spokesperson.

"The mudslinging is indicative of how competitive the domestic airline industry has become and how valuable international service -- relative to domestic service -- is, especially in a market where there is restricted output," said Darin Lee, who has assisted airlines in bidding for China routes in the past as an aviation economist with Cambridge, MA-based LECG.

"If China was completely open, this would be different."

The one-upmanship attempts don't usually make any difference in the decision making processes, said Dan Kasper, managing director of LECG, and a former chief of the Civil Aeronautics Board's international division, which used to regulate the airline industry, including the China routes.

He said the DOT's bureaucrats will make the decision based on the agency's criteria of serving underserved areas and increasing competition between the airlines.

"The department realizes that these are high-stakes proceedings for all of the carriers," he said.

Delta wants the routes so bad it has even turned on its SkyTeam Alliance airline partner, Northwest, saying it is "one of two entrenched" carriers that "squanders" its rights to fly to China "to feed its Tokyo hub instead."

"This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black," responds Northwest. "Northwest's Narita hub is a US carrier hub, just like Atlanta, and there is no principled basis for disparaging the benefits Northwest provides to the US traveling public merely because Northwest's passengers happen to change planes in Japan instead of Georgia."

Northwest is trying to get a new nonstop route between Detroit and Shanghai.

There is a benefit in all this. The negative banter certainly "makes for entertaining reading at the DOT," said Kasper.

FMI: www.delta.com, www.nwa.com, www.dot.gov