Presidential candidates must address airline industry woes

Presidential candidates must address airline industry woes

Presidential candidates John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have something new they can talk about on the campaign trail: the future of commercial aviation in the United States.

An aviation crisis has been building during a year that saw the cost of jet fuel increase by nearly 75 percent. Some of the nation’s smaller low-cost airlines have simply folded, gone into bankruptcy or are flirting with bankruptcy. Bigger airlines are taking new looks at mergers, most notably the agreement announced Tuesday by Delta and Northwest.

For the nearly 2 million Americans who take to the sky every day, flying may never be the same. For one thing, the era of dirt-cheap flights is almost certainly coming to an end. Columbus-based Skybus Airlines, subject of a glowing “60 Minutes” report only a few months ago, abruptly shut down, showing what happens when expenses over which a discount airline has no control start to pile up. Its debts are estimated at $50 million to $100 million.

Frontier Airlines was pushed into bankruptcy when its credit card processing company announced that it would begin keeping a larger share of the Denver airlines ticket revenue, ironically as a hedge against losing money on ticket refunds if the airline stopped flying.

Other carriers could face similar credit crunches.

More to come

It has been a bad couple of weeks for the airline industry in general, with the biggest headlines going to flights that were canceled by Southwest Airlines and American Airlines because the FAA grounded hundreds of planes for safety checks. But safety checks come and go; there is no letup in sight for the economic pressures, led by fuel costs, that are squeezing the industry.

The Travel Industry Association is among the first to call for the presidential candidates to start talking about how their administrations would address the airline industry’s problems. Roger Dow, president and CEO of the Travel Industry Association, points out that more than the airline industry’s well-being is at stake. Hundreds of thousands of jobs at hotels, rental car agencies, theme parks and other travel destinations depend on an efficient air travel system. Likewise, air travel has become an integral part of doing business — if not, there wouldn’t be a couple of million passengers in the air each day. When air travel becomes more expensive or routes are cut, the cost of doing business goes up for companies throughout the nation.

The presidential candidates have been talking about jobs and trade, the mortgage crisis and the weakening dollar — at least to some extent. More often they’ve been talking among themselves about issues that are superficial at best. The fallout from a crippled airline industry gives the candidates another important economic issue to address. The more they talk about it, the more they, and the American people, will realize how important it is.