US Airways, Delta try to fix DCA, LGA competition

by Tom Belden

Published Mar. 23, 2010, 10:09 a.m. ET

Delta and US Airways announced last night that they agreed to sell 20 of their takeoff-and-landing slots at New York LaGuardia and Washington Reagan National airports to four smaller carriers so they could proceed with a larger exchange of slots. Giving up 20 of the pairs of slots fall short, by 14, of what the Federal Aviation Administration told the major airlines they needed to do to limit their market control, Delta at LGA and US Airways at DCA. The four smaller airlines are AirTran, Spirit and Westjet Holdings, which would get more access to LGA, and JetBlue, which would get slots at National.

This issue got scant coverage locally so we're turning to other articles that explains the agreement in more detail, and includes the fact that federal regulators haven't had time to respond to what Delta and US Airways proposed. The story includes Southwest's response. My first thought when I read Delta and US Airways' announcement was that Southwest, which has just a handful of daily flights from LGA because of the limited slots available, had been cut out of deal. That's logical from the DL or US perspective: They would much rather compete against any other carrier than Southwest.