[passthefist]

For one, there's cabotage restrictions. From wikipedia:

> Cabotage rights are the right of a company from one country to trade in another country. In aviation, it is the right to operate within the domestic borders of another country. Most countries do not permit aviation cabotage, and there are strict sanctions against it, for reasons of economic protectionism, national security, or public safety. One notable exception is the European Union, whose Member States all grant cabotage rights to each other.

Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019.

> "Because I'm not American, the US Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover," Branson wrote of his powerlessness to halt the pending merger. "So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it."

Cabotage ends up being a form of protectionism, though it's usually touted as a national security thing.

Compare this to the EU, which has some dirt cheap flights. Ryanair might suck, but I've flown from Dublin to Amsterdam for $10. The EU has less restrictions (almost none for member states, I think?), so there's more competition. Some domestic airlines have been trying the Ryanair model, but I'd like to see what would happen if Ryanair was able to expand to the states.

This also means that foreign airlines can't operate flights between US cities, even if they'd be a leg of a larger journey. Instead they're reliant on US carriers to get people to their hubs. Toronto, for example, is the largest hub for Air Canada, and they have flights to dozens of American cities. There's no real fear that Canadian planes are any less safe than American ones, yet you can't use Air Canada to fly on a single ticket from an American city, via Toronto, to another American city. Air Canada's website won't even let you search for flights between two American destinations.

It's even worse for someone like Air Emirates. They only have a handful of places they fly out of in the states, so if you're flying from Dubai to somewhere not on that list you'd need another ticket. Maybe they'd like to do a San Francisco to NYC to Dubai flight, moving to a collector model, but they're stuck doing point to point. I'd imagine flying people into a domestic collector city first would be cheaper than the many non-stop flights they currently have.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/richard-branson-virgin-america...

[rayiner]

I asked for an example of the kind of regulation 'zeteo was complaining about (ones that involve "hidden flaws," "regulatory capture," "the revolving door," and/or excessive "compliance cost").

Whether or not it would be a good idea to permit foreign airlines to operate domestic flights, such restrictions are open and straightforward protectionism. They are not some "tiny exception in article 57 paragraph 30" that a regulator snuck in weeks before being "hired by the affected companies at a multiple of their previous salary."

[FireBeyond]

> Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019.

True. To my experience, though, I think that Alaska's customer service is comparable to Virgin's. I despite most US domestic airlines, with the exception of Virgin, Alaska, and to a lesser extent Delta.

[ComradeTaco]

Jet Blue is generally very pleasant.

[notahacker]

Cabotage restrictions really don't have anything to do with why Ryanair (or easyJet or Wizz) don't operate in the US though; it has no overlap whatsoever with the market they operate in, they don't do connecting flights and if the economics favoured the low cost model expanding to many more routes in the US then Southwest or US-based startups might have made more of a go of it in the last two or three decades (the US doesn't exactly suffer from lack of people with the knowhow and access to capital to start airline businesses if they think some routes are under-served). It's also possible for sufficiently motivated foreign entrepreneurs to circumvent with subsidiaries and joint ventures: the AirAsia operations are a good example of this.

Cabotage might kill off a handful of potentially viable routes between the largest cities for relatively unusual multi-stage flights, but it's not really the reason why most domestic routes end up being local monopolies or duopolies. Emirates might have an interest flying an NYC-San Francisco leg, but it's difficult to imagine a foreign competitor being interested in a Denver-Houston route, never mind Denver-Wichita or Denver-Durango

[madcaptenor]

Other than Toronto, are there any airports that would really even make sense as transit points between two American cities?

[kbenson]

I think the point is that you also can't do Toronto -> New York -> Washington D.C. and the reverse. presumably, you could get some people that wanted the full trip and some that wanted either leg and together have a profitable full route, but instead they are stuck with two separate routes, Toronto -> New York and Toronto -> Washington D.C. with no other options, and must rely on a a domestic airline to approximate that.

[madcaptenor]

Two-leg flights with one end at Toronto would certainly work. But if it weren't for the national borders, I could see Toronto acting as a hub in the North American air travel system like Chicago or Detroit. For example, say someone wants to get between medium-sized cities in New England and the upper Midwest - say, for the sake of concreteness, Providence and Milwaukee. On this route you can fly Delta and change in Detroit, or United and change in Chicago, or other routes that don't make geographic sense (Delta via Atlanta, American via Philly or Charlotte). Why not Air Canada through Toronto? This particularly works in Toronto's case because of its position so far south in Canada, where a lot of flights between eastern and western US destinations might actually pass over Canadian airspace.

(Map: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=pvd-mke,+pvd-yyz-mke,+pvd-dtw-m...)