The airplane, like the elevator, has given us lots of silly "ups-and-downs" jokes over the years, but the airline industry also gives us real-world doses of joy and disappointment -- usually one following the other, as in some recent headlines.
For a dose of joy, go online and roll your mouse over Dallas on the Southwest interactive route map. You'll see things you never saw before. There are bright red lines signifying nonstop service from Love Field to places like Orlando, Chicago and Las Vegas -- points that simply weren't on the Love Field route map until last week.
These routes used to be, in a word, illegal.
We can thank the demise of the Wright Amendment for these new red lines, and for others that will follow. It took a long time to get rid of this awful law, adopted in 1979 for the dubious purpose of "protecting" the then-new DFW Airport by limiting service at Love. Even the exit process took a long time: local officials and the airlines agreed to the plan in 2006, with an eight-year phase-out.
The big day arrived on Columbus Day last week when Southwest opened seven new long-haul routes from DAL.
The Wright Amendment was one of the worst examples of government micromanagement of travel markets that we have seen, and we're glad it's gone.
Airports may be public infrastructure, but they are also marketplaces where airlines and their passengers come together. What happens in them should be left, to the extent possible, to the buyers and sellers -- not the politicians.
Alas, the joy in Dallas is being matched by disappointment in Virginia, where efforts to bring back the PeoplExpress name have suffered another setback.
Three months after its launch, PeoplExpress suspended service at the end of September with the expectation that it would resume in mid-October.
The company now says it won't meet that date and is pursuing plans to organize a charter program offering flights from Newport News to some of the destinations it had served, such as Newark, Boston, Atlanta, and points in Florida.
This strikes us as another case of government micromanagement gone wrong.
It's doubtful that PeoplExpress would have chosen Newport News as a home base had the community not had a $950,000 Small Community Air Service Development Grant from the Transportation Department, which enabled it to offer financial incentives to attract scheduled service.
But things didn't go according to plan. PeoplExpress failed to obtain an airline license from the DOT and also failed in an attempt to hasten the process by acquiring an existing airline, the now-bankrupt Xtra Airways.
PeoplExpress then resorted to Plan B, which was to license its name to a third-party, an obscure Las Vegas-based carrier called Vision Airlines.
Now that Vision has suspended the service, PeoplExpress is floating Plan C: becoming a tour operator and organizing public charter flights, using a yet-undisclosed airline.
We're not optimistic that this is going to end well for PeoplExpress, its customers or Newport News.
We sympathize with any community's desire to improve its air service, through either airport use restrictions or financial incentives, but experience has shown that these interventions more often lead down than up.