The Transpacific Route Case was a major administrative law case argued before the Civil Aeronautics Board for much of the 1960s. Before the case, the only U.S. airlines permitted to fly transpacific routes were Pan Am and Northwest Orient. Continental Airlines also flew transpacific routes on military contract, but was not allowed to carry civilians.
President Dwight Eisenhower opened the case in 1959 in order to investigate opening the market up to further competition, but he closed the case shortly before leaving office. John F. Kennedy reopened the case in 1961.
The CAB concluded the case in 1969, retaining Northwest and Pan Am's routes to Asia and making the following additional route awards:
The award was a great victory for TWA, which had already established service from the U.S. to Europe, connecting onward as far east as Hong Kong. The case gave TWA a "round the world route" and allowed it to serve South and Southeast Asia in both westbound and eastbound directions. Initially, Continental Airlines was awarded routes to Australia and New Zealand with stops. However, President Nixon, upon taking office set aside the international route awards. The rights previously given to Continental Airlines were later given to American Airlines.
One loser in the case was American, which had petitioned long and hard for rights to serve Japan: it did not want the South Pacific routes, and it ended up trading those routes to Pan Am. United Airlines was the biggest loser of all: it received no transpacific routes, besides some Hawaiian routes that were added in the early 1960s.
America West Airlines was a United States major airline, founded in 1981, with service commencing in 1983, and having reached US$1 billion in annual revenue in 1989, headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. At the time of its acquisition of US Airways, America West had the unique distinction of being the only post-deregulation U.S. airline still operating under its original operating certificate. Their main hub was at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, with a secondary hub at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. The airline acquired US Airways in 2005 but took on the name of US Airways. America West served about 100 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico; flights to Europe were on codeshare partners. In March 2005 the airline had 132 aircraft, with a single maintenance base at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Regional jet and turboprop flights were operated on a code sharing basis by Mesa Airlines and Chautauqua Airlines as America West Express.
Pan American World Airways, originally founded as Pan American Airways and commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal and largest international air carrier and unofficial flag carrier of the United States from 1927 until its collapse on December 4, 1991. It was founded in 1927 as a scheduled air mail and passenger service operating between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba. The airline is credited for many innovations that shaped the international airline industry, including the widespread use of jet aircraft, jumbo jets, and computerized reservation systems. It was also a founding member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the global airline industry association.
Continental Airlines was a major United States airline founded in 1934 and eventually headquartered in Houston, Texas. It had ownership interests and brand partnerships with several carriers.
Northwest Airlines Corp. was a major United States airline founded in 1926 and absorbed into Delta Air Lines, Inc. by a merger. The merger, approved on October 29, 2008, made Delta the largest airline in the world until the American Airlines-US Airways merger on December 9, 2013. Northwest continued to operate under its own name and brand until the integration of the carriers was completed on January 31, 2010.
Trans World Airlines (TWA) was a major American airline which operated from 1930 until 2001. It was formed as Transcontinental & Western Air to operate a route from New York City to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Kansas City, and other stops, with Ford Trimotors. With American, United, and Eastern, it was one of the "Big Four" domestic airlines in the United States formed by the Spoils Conference of 1930.
Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the principal aviation gateway of the City and County of Honolulu on Oahu in the State of Hawaii. It is one of the 30 busiest airports in United States, with traffic now exceeding 21 million passengers a year and rising.
Fairbanks International Airport is a state-owned public-use airport located three miles (5 km) southwest of the central business district of Fairbanks, a city in the Fairbanks North Star Borough of the United States state of Alaska. Fairbanks is the smallest city in the United States with non-stop service to Europe, as Condor offers weekly flights to Frankfurt during the summer tourist season. Air North is another international airline with flights.
Regional airlines are airlines that operate regional aircraft to provide passenger air service to communities without sufficient demand to attract mainline service. There are two main ways for a regional airline to do business:
As an affiliated airline, contracting with a major airline, operating under their brand name, and filling two roles: delivering passengers to the major airline's hubs from surrounding towns, and increasing frequency of service on mainline routes during times when demand does not warrant use of large aircraft, known as commuter flights.
Operating as an independent airline under their own brand, mostly providing service to small and isolated towns, for whom the airline is the only reasonable link to a larger town. Examples of this are PenAir, which links the remote Aleutian Islands to Anchorage, Alaska, and Mokulele Airlines, which operates in the Hawaiian islands.
Francisco Anthony "Frank" Lorenzo is an American businessman. He is well known for his leadership of Continental Airlines and Texas International Airlines, between 1972 and 1990, through airline deregulation. Lorenzo also led the creation and management of the holding company for the group, Texas Air Corporation, through which New York Air was formed in 1980 and Eastern Air Lines was acquired in 1986, as well as Frontier Airlines and People Express Airlines.
The freedoms of the air are a set of commercial aviation rights granting a country's airlines the privilege to enter and land in another country's airspace. They were formulated as a result of disagreements over the extent of aviation liberalisation in the Convention on International Civil Aviation of 1944, known as the Chicago Convention. The United States had called for a standardized set of separate air rights to be negotiated between states, but most other countries were concerned that the size of the U.S. airlines would dominate air travel if there were not strict rules. The freedoms of the air are the fundamental building blocks of the international commercial aviation route network. The use of the terms "freedom" and "right" confers entitlement to operate international air services only within the scope of the multilateral and bilateral treaties that allow them.
The Bermuda Agreement, reached in 1946 by American and British negotiators in Bermuda, was an early bilateral air transport agreement regulating civil air transport. It established a precedent for the signing of approximately 3,000 other such agreements between countries. The Agreement was replaced by the Bermuda II Agreement, which was signed in 1977 and effective in 1978.
Bermuda II was a bilateral air transport agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States signed on 23 July 1977 as a renegotiation of the original 1946 Bermuda air services agreement. A new open skies agreement was signed by the United States and the European Union (EU) on 30 April 2007 and came into effect on 30 March 2008, thus replacing Bermuda II.
Pago Pago International Airport, also known as Tafuna Airport, is a public airport located 7 miles (11.3 km) southwest of the central business district of Pago Pago, in the village and plains of Tafuna on the island of Tutuila in American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States.
A government contract flight is a type of charter airline operation contracted with a government agency.
A legacy carrier, in the United States, is an airline that had established interstate routes before the beginning of the route liberalization permitted by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and so was directly affected by that Act. It is distinct from a low-cost carrier, which, in the United States, are generally new airlines and were started to compete in the newly-deregulated industry.
There are bilateral treaties that govern aviation rights between the United States and China, which cover both passenger services and cargo services. The United States has liberal aviation agreements with many countries but not China, Japan, South Africa, and some South American countries. However, there is no "open skies" agreement between China and the US, which generally refers to an agreement that allows unrestricted flights between countries. The current US-China treaty specifies the number of flights permitted. Due to the highly regulated nature of awards for route authority between the two countries and the strict limits on number of flights, the application process is competitive. US airlines have sought to gain support from local politicians and the general public to influence the US government into awarding routes.
Wake Island Airfield is a military air base located on Wake Island, which is known for the Battle of Wake Island during World War II. It is owned by the U.S. Air Force and operated by the 611th Air Support Group. The airfield primarily serves military flight activity within the Wake Island region; however, military presence is minimal at the current time. The runway can be used for emergency landings by commercial jetliners flying transpacific routes and has been used in the past by airlines operating jet, turboprop and prop aircraft on scheduled flights.
A polar route is an aircraft route across the uninhabited polar ice cap regions. The term "polar route" was originally applied to great circle navigation routes between Europe and the west coast of North America in the 1950s.
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