I just saw in the UAL forum that UAL had 'applied to fly SFO-CAN'

Who do they apply to?

Why can't they just fly whatever they want [and buy gates, etc.] from people that own them?

Why doesn't this work ina free enterprise mode?

Is that why airlines like Qantas profitable [government protection]?

International flights are governed by treaties and international law and governments must grant permission for a foreign airline to land in their country. IATA tends to be a clearing house for a lot of this as they are part of the United Nations but in reality it depends on the treaty between the two countries. If open skies exist ie between the United States and Canada as a general rule all the airline needs is to aquire facilities at the airports, hire staff etc etc and IIRC file some basic paperwork with the two governments. Hope this helps some.

UAL (and CO) have applied to the US DOT for authority to fly additional flights to China. China and the US have a somewhat restrictive treaty, but it was amended in 2004 to allow many more flights. Since those rights are somewhat valuable, many airlines will apply for them, forcing the DOT to make some difficult decisions.

All international flights are subject to treaties. As the previous post indicated, many countries have "open-skies" agreements with one another, making new routes very easy to initiate. But flights to China are at the other end of the spectrum.

There are attempts to do this.

For example, within the EU, any EU airline can operate any route between any two EU points without having to apply for a route authority, as the old bilateral system has been completely broken down between EU countries and replaced by intra-EU open skies. Then it's just a matter of pure business arrangements.

Similarly, I believe that Australia and New Zealand have a unified aviation market.There's no doubt that some airlines benefit from protection by their own governments, and Qantas is the subject of some suspicion because of the profits which it makes on one particular route (SYD-LAX).

But QF is also an example of the multi-factorial reasons behind a successful airline's success. It actually has good products, which some people are prepared to pay more money for. It holds its own against international competition on just about all of its international routes. Its main domestic competitor mismanaged itself into oblivion in a free enterprise world (compare the walking dead of the US airlines which have languished in Chapter 11, hurting their more successful competitors during the process). It has developed a bold (and apparently successful - so far) strategy for dealing with the main competitor that has since emerged. It has a strong national franchise. And even on that single route on which it makes so much money, it has actual, future and potential competitors (UA, AC and NZ) - yet continues to hold it own in some style.

So it's not just government protection which makes QF profitable, even if the suspicions have any substance to them.

Also, if you have more flights than gates for at certain time, or more planes trying to land than one can allow......

It stills seems like the free market would be better at determing who should fly to where when.

There is ways to assign ownership to gates / times / etc. so companies interested in specific times / gates / locations could buy them from each other.

I just wonder how the travel landscape would look under true competition.

Yes, the (world's) allocation of resources would be more efficient with a free market approach, but the political aspects must be considered too. Firstly, countries want to ensure that their own nationals have employment working for their own nation's airline. There are also taxation issues, with profits accruing in the home country as opposed to foreign, etc. etc.

Utter nonsense. IATA is about as much a part of the United Nations as Flyertalk is.

Airlines are probably the last industry in the world that have and ever will embrace globalization and free trade. That, however, is a 50 page article onto itself.

The point that I am getting at is that as much as gates can be dealt like commodities (which they are), there isn't enough to go around for the ideal times. I can create an airline and easily get gates faster than anyone else if I took the scraps, like the 2pm arrivial time, but if that means my plane leaving the origin at 3 am departure, I'm boned. Know what I mean? Charter airlines do that, and look how much respect they have...

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. So who is FT's Permanent Representative to the UN?

Applying for (or activating existing) route authority is different from having approved landing slots at any given airport. Slots can be and are fungible to an extent, but no slot = no service, even if you have authority.

I don't think FT has a UN Permanent Representative. Only Observer status. Obviously the Secretariat haven't read OMNI, or else they would go home and hand running the world over to FTers. (Told you they didn't know what they were doing.)

If that happened, the UN better soon prepare for disaster recovery in the aftermath of a wacko-inspired nuclear war, probably launched most disasterously by one of the Permanent 5 and inspired by tribalism of one form or another. The UN shows competence when staying off the OMNI-ite path. Perhaps the UN will work out space flight arrangements a little more thoroughly too? Oh wait, there is UNCOPUS.

Actually, the ownership of gates by airlines (even under leasing arrangements) has some anti-competitive effects. Although this is the model used in the US and Australia (of the countries that I frequently visit), it's not universally used and most airports I see don't have this arrangement. It's very common to have gates allocated dynamically by the airport company rather than under airline control. In countries where there are ownership/leasing arrangements, gate ownership becomes an additional problem whenever competition issues arise (eg on takeovers or mergers).

Whooopppsss. I mean ICAO is part of the UN which doesn't have much to do with route authorities.

Is it?

I thought ICAO had been set up by the Chicago Convention. There's nothing about the UN on its website.