The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) has finalized five perimeter exempt slot pair awards for operations to and from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA).
These slots were tentatively awarded back in October but, there was a question regarding the legality of some of the tentative awards at the time. Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, jetBlue, Southwest, Spirit, and United all made their proposals for new or expanded service should they be granted additional slots. Predictably since the airport is in Washington, and the government is responsible for awarding the slots, there was a political angle on almost every request.
Now we can remove the tentative tags from the five routes that were announced a few months back. DCA will see new or expanded service to the following destinations:
- Alaska: 1x daily to/from San Diego (SAN)
- American: 1x daily to/from San Antonio (SAT)
- Delta: 1x daily to/from Seattle (SEA). This service will compete with Alaska’s existing service on the route.
- Southwest: 1x daily to/from Las Vegas (LAS) with continuing, no change of plane service to Sacramento (SMF)
- United: 2x daily to/from San Francisco (SFO). United will be adding a second frequency to its existing DCA-SFO service and will also compete with Alaska on the route.
The legality of these awards is still being questioned and there are some airlines, namely Spirit, that may still be inclined to take legal action. While I won’t get into al of the details here, View from the Wing has a great write-up on the current situation and interpretations of the law.
Summary
The Department of Transportation has finalized the issuance of five perimeter exempt slot awards at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. While this didn’t come as much surprise, given the fact that the DOT already announced the winners, there have been some questions regarding the legality of how the slots were awarded.
