With New York continuing to be a hot airline market and with all three major airports having strict limits on the number of flights per day and sometimes per hour, it's hard for an airline to expand its schedule or get into the market. And that's leading to a number of fights and strategies over who gets the highly-valued slots.
At Newark Liberty, for example, both Frontier and Spirit are planning major expansions, but their efforts are going in different directions. Frontier has planned a big expansion but is avoiding some of the scarcity issue by using its slots outside of peak hours so as not to run into hourly limits—but that may make for less-than-best connections elsewhere.
Spirit is taking a less accomodationist approach: It's suing the U.S. Department of Transportation over DOT's plan to 'sunset' 16 slots, each allowing a take-off or landing, reducing the airport's capacity. The slots in question used to belong to Southwest, which stopped its Newark operations in November. Spirit says the slots should stay, and should be distributed to smaller carriers at the United-dominated airport. Southwest originally got the slots in 2010 as part of the deal allowing United to take over Continental, another major Newark user.
Southwest itself, and JetBlue are on the other side of a slot dispute at New York LaGuardia, where they are asking DOT to take 16 slots away from WestJet. The airline is waiting approval on a proposed partnership with Delta that would increase Delta's dominance at LGA. Southwest and JetBlue both have expansion plans that involve LGA. Ironically, the slots that they want taken from WestJet only came to WestJet in 2011 as part of a deal to reduce dominance by USAir and Delta.
The slot disputes illustrate an unresolved question in air industry planning: Should slots be 'fairly' distributed to allow more competition and new carriers, or should airlines be allowed to accumulate them one by one and become an airport's dominant carrier, as Delta and United have done.
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