A Showdown in the Skies Over LAX

The skies over Los Angeles International Airport are anything but friendly these days. The now-ended strike by flight attendants against American Airlines tied up travel at LAX as well as at airports across the country for several days before President Clinton asked the airline and the union to agree to arbitration. Now 75 major air carriers continue to fight new LAX landing fees proposed by Mayor Richard Riordan and his airport commissioners. A possibly dangerous showdown is brewing.

The mayor angrily reiterated in a television interview Sunday that the city will deny landing rights to any airline that does not pay the new landing fees the city imposed last June. Twenty-one smaller carriers are paying the increased charges.

Fees jumped from 51 cents to $1.56 per 1,000 pounds of landed weight, or from about $300 to $900 for a Boeing 747 carrying an average load. This steep hike represents the first significant increase in LAX’s landing fees in decades.

The recession-plagued carriers are understandably loath to give up what has become over time an incredible bargain. The 51-cent fee was intended to be just that. It was set low to entice airlines to what was, in the 1940s and ‘50s, a very new Los Angeles International Airport. Even the new $1.56 fee, although double the 75-cent landing fee charged at the San Francisco airport, is still lower than the $2.22 fee airlines pay to land at New York’s Kennedy Airport, the $1.89 fee at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and the $1.75 fee charged at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport.

So while carriers reasonably fear the fiscal hit from higher fees, the dollar amount is not really the crux of the matter. Rather, to the airlines, the fee hikes, set against the backdrop of heated City Hall rhetoric in recent months about privatization and making the airlines pay their “fair share,” appear to be the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.

The mayor has backpedaled some on his plans for privatization or diverting airport revenue to other city purposes in the face of warnings from federal transportation officials that airport revenue, especially federal grants, must be used solely for airport purposes.

But these warnings aside, the city has every right to increase airport landing fees to fund the airport’s own legitimate budgetary needs. That’s why the airlines failed in their attempt to get an injunction against the imposition of these fees in a series of appeals, most recently to the U.S. Supreme Court. The airlines’ underlying claim, that the increased charges are unreasonable, is pending in federal court.

Beginning at 12:01 a.m. next Saturday, carriers that refuse to pay the new fees would be shut out of the airport, an unprecedented move. It would also be costly not just to the airlines and the traveling public but to the city. Yet the new fees are all but unavoidable and the city is right to insist on payment.