If you’ve ever heard of ‘cabotage’ before, you’re likely a lawyer or a candidate to appear on Jeopardy, but airline regulators know about it, and now Qantas, the Austrailian airline has fallen afoul of it, as much as $125,000 worth.
Cabotage is the carrying of passengers from a place (port, originally, but airports now as well) in one country to another place in the same country. It’s the rule behind why Emirates and the others can sell you tickets to or from other countries, but not from New York to Los Angeles. And that’s what Qantas did, under what it thought was an exception.
The exception allows an airline like Qantas to sell a ticket from, say London to Sydney, or Melbourne on a plane that stops in New York and Los Angeles along the way. That’s a common route; it’s only last week that Qantas started its first non-stop between the UK and home.
That London-to-Australia flight can also sell tickets to points along the way, specifically to New York, or to Los Angeles. And, it can sell tickets from New York to other Australian cities, with passengers changing planes in Los Angeles to another Qantas plane.
And that’s where the complication set in. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that’s another Qantas plane. Physical owned aircraft. Qantas believed it also covered LA connections to other airlines’ planes, as long as there was a Qantas code-share on the ticket, so that the customer was physically switching to Air Tahiti Nui to Tahiti, but with a QF code on the ticket.
Qantas says it still believes it’s right, and that the law is outmoded, but it’s agreed to pay the fine and end the practice. And you might say it’s fair play: Qantas has repeatedly shot down attempts to allow cabotage on its own territory, even when the Australian government proposed it as a way to beef up tourism access to underserved areas.
Now that you know about cabotage, some aspects of the negotiations over Brexit may make a bit more sense; the airlines of the EU and the EEA partners have an agreement that treats them all as a single country. Under that rule, Ryanair has become Italy’s largest domestic carrier (see yesterday’s Gumbo News), and because of it, British-based EasyJet has created a new European company to ensure it still has access to Europe if Britain is not allowed to continue in the Single European Sky agreement.
