The air transport sector is one that is particularly conducive to market dominance, and therefore to potential abuse thereof. Characterised, for several decades, by the omnipresence of barriers attributable to the preferential treatment enjoyed by undertakings under the sponsorship of their respective governments, European civil air transport has undergone progressive liberalisation over the years, under the auspices of the European institutions. / The object of the present thesis is to assess how the provisions of Article 82 of the E.C. Treaty have applied to the air transport sector prior and subsequent to deregulation, and how they remain indispensable, in the wake of emerging new factors that tend to keep the market of scheduled air services oligopolistic.

The airline industry has been the subject of numerous studies both before and after deregulation. None of these, however have explicitly modelled the cost savings due to deregulation. This thesis develops a number of testable hypotheses about technological and managerial choice as they pertain to regulatory reform. The results of the tests show that the production technology the airlines developed post-deregulation is not unambiguously more efficient than the pre-deregulatoin technology. The unregulated output and network structure, however, appear to be more efficient than those utilized during regulation. A model is developed to decompose the change in cost due to deregulation. It is found that approximately 5% of the reduction in cost is the result of the new technology while 95% of the savings stems from the new output and network structures.

The formation of airline alliances has been a distinctive feature of the airline business at the threshold of the new millennium. This is due to the framework of Bilateral Air Transport Agreements, which condition the grant of traffic rights to substantial ownership and effective control being vested in nationals of one of the contracting parties. Further regulatory aspects pertaining to airline alliances include competition law review, traffic rights, and slot allocation. / This thesis seeks to elucidate how Star had to adapt its strategic choices to this framework. The outcome will be that in particular the lack of regulatory convergence in competition law matters constitutes a hindrance to a global alliance such as Star. The issue of ownership and control might represent a further obstacle to an alliance intending to rely on mergers or major share holding, an ambition that Star has not nourished so far. Open Skies agreements in force between the U.S., Canada, and several member states of the European Union give alliances full commercial opportunities, unhindered by restrictive capacity or approval of fares provisions. The principles as regards slot allocation, on the other hand, have enabled alliances to build up their hubs as fortresses. / The issues of competition law, and ownership and control illustrate that it has become increasingly insufficient to rely on a merely bilateral approach to global problems. Eventually, satisfactory solutions may only be achieved on a multilateral level. The onus thus is on aviation regulators to come up with a more suitable framework for aviation in the next century. / Multilateralism, however, might turn out to herald the end to the alliance phenomenon. Once the bilateral strait jacket put aside, the aviation industry will consolidate like any other industry: by mergers, that is.

The 'Open Skies' policy launched by the United States in 1992 gave birth to new bilateral agreements between them and most Member States of the European Union, as the latter were adopting a single aviation market. Nevertheless, the nationality clause the agreements included conflicted with the Community principle of freedom of establishment. / On November 5, 2002, the European Court of Justice therefore ruled there was indeed violation. However, the true question raised by the agreements focused less on such violation, which was anterior to those agreements, than on their fragmentation and the inequality they created in the Europe/United States aviation relations. / Indeed, the issue to be stressed in the judgments is linked to the building of the external competence of the Union with regards to aviation. While the Court refused to grant total competence to the Community, it made that of the Member States impracticable, leading to a global mandate for the Commission. / Although the orientations of the agreements to be concluded are foreseeable, the role the European Union will play in a potential multilateral negotiation remains to be defined.

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The deregulation of the airline industry created a myriad of changes in the U.S. air transport system that has both defended and sparked debate on the wisdom of such policy change for over three decades. One of the promises of deregulation from its proponents in the 1970s was increased competition that would lead to a reduction in fares for consumers. Historic data and literature has indeed shown this to be to the case as average airfares have trended downward especially over the last twenty years. Nonetheless, the industry has become much more complex since deregulation in terms of pricing to the point that very sophisticated yield management computer models are used to achieve an optimum balance between load factors and price. Consequently, this has in turn translated into a haphazard experience for most air travelers in the United States; for instance, the cost of a ticket is sometimes lower traveling from coast to coast than within a particular region of the U.S. and paid fares for the exact same trip can deviate dramatically, often based on variation in the date of purchase. Additionally, this has also resulted in a spatial pattern where certain regions throughout the country have enjoyed lower airfares more so than others. This research seeks to identify this regional disparity using a geographically weighted regression and spatial autoregressive models in a sample of 6,200 routes between 80 primary U.S. airports. The results from the global model showed that variables which measure competition (airlines), operating cost (flights, distance) and elasticity (layover time) proved to be statistically significant and had a positive relationship with airfare The GWR results indicated that while some factors like distance, and hub size, were statistically significant almost nationwide, other factors such as frequency, presence of low cost carriers, and numbers of airlines were only statistically significant at certain airports. Finally, the spatial regressions models indicate that the spatial autocorrelation found in U.S. airfares resemble the first order properties of spatial autocorrelation (i.e. spatial heterogeneity) and not the second order properties (i.e. spatial dependence). / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis discusses the background, contents and airpolitical consequences of the so-called 'Horizontal Agreements ("HA"),' concluded by the European Union ("EU") with third countries to give effect to the European Court of Justice's ("Court"/"ECJ") decision of November 2002 in the 'Open Skies' cases brought by the European Commission ("EC"/"Commission") against certain EU Member States. / The Court's decision outlaws the nationality or 'ownership and control' clause in the bilateral ('Open Skies') agreements concluded with the United States by those Member States. As this clause is a standard provision in all bilateral air services agreements, the Court's decision actually obliges the Member States to amend those agreements and replace the said clauses by provisions which do not discriminate on the basis of nationality. / The Member States have in the meantime mandated the Commission to engage in such negotiations on their behalf on the basis of a jointly developed Model Horizontal Agreement ("MHA"), containing a non-discriminatory so-called Community clause and some other provisions on matters within the exclusive competence of the Community. / This research thus examines the legal and airpolitical implications of these Horizontal Agreements, which the Commission has concluded in the meantime and continues to propose to third countries. In this connection, attention is given to the scenario of the anticipated Horizontal Agreement negotiations between the EU and the Republic of Korea.