I'm bumping this up to the top. To those who read this, I cannot stress how important it is that you guys take two minutes of your time to submit a docket. The pending results of this decission can have a major affect on the fares you pay to fly trans-Atlantic.

the justice department filed its opinion today-- AGAINST. DOT gets final say-- so presumably there's still time for people to weigh in.

two sentences, plus a link:

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuot...9227852_newsml
----------------
WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Friday urged against giving antitrust immunity to five members of the SkyTeam airline alliance, saying the carriers had failed to show the benefits would outweigh potential harms.

In comments filed with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Justice Department said there was "a significant risk" of reduced competition if the airlines were allowed wide latitude to share information and coordinate their operations.

Good - make it an openly competitive environment or give everyone similar privileges and exemptions, imo. And think, SU is going to become part of SkyTeam... :rolleyes: Maybe they should give Aeroflop some exemption of some kind as well, just so they feel good. (I don't think I'll use my remaining CO miles on SU, thank you.)

Thanks
 

for bringing this to my attention. I've filled out the form in opposition of the skyteam anti-trust immunity.

Done! ^ ^

Thanks!

Done!

You might want to post this in other forums as well.

eli

I think it made the rounds of several of them, the first time around. would make the most sense in non-SkyTeam forums, of course.

It looks like DOT ruled against Skyteam;
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051222/airli...ance.html?.v=2

This IAH-ORD-LHR flight is very interesting. Out of curiosity, I checked this out on BA.com and Orbitz. IAH-ORD seems to be on BA metal (777) and not bookable IAH-ORD-IAH.

It seems like such a waste to fly a 777 over half-empty (no proof, but it's gotta be) between Houston and Chicago and that an AA codeshare would be better, but what do I know. If it wasn't cost-effective, BA wouldn't do it. My guess is that there is some premium-flying corporate contract that makes this worthwhile for BA.

British Petroleum has large operations in both the Chicago Area and Houston and it could be the fat corporate contract that keeps that odd route afloat.

This is unlikely to be the reason since I doubt BA can carry IAH-ORD traffic on this flight. It's more likely to be about aircraft utilization (rather than having the aircraft sit in Chicago, it's apparently marginally profitable to fly some premium IAH-LHR traffic by this method). It's pretty odd that anyone has that strong a preference for LHR, though: BA actually also fly nonstop IAH-LGW, as well as the IAH-ORD-LHR service.