In an apparent victory for JetBlue and other airlines, the Dutch government’s plan to reduce flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport as a noise reduction measure has been abandoned, at least for now, the government announced.
Under the plan to cut annual flights from 500,000 to 460,000, airlines without a long history at the airport would have lost their slots for next summer, and those with long-standing operations would be cut back a bit over 3%.
JetBlue, which only recently added flights to Amsterdam and would have been one of those squeezed out, complained to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and asked DOT to bar KLM, the Dutch flag carrier, from New York’s JFK if the cuts happened.
That added to pressure from the European Commission and from a consortium of other airlines, including KLM, that had sued over the cuts. Their suit won an initial case, but was overturned on appeal. While the government has now said the new plan is ‘suspended,’ it did not indicate when or if it would try again.
