Friendship

The traditional charges of incompetence and improper influence which beset the Federal Aviation Agency have taken a very unpleasant twist in the last few months. The FAA has apparently lost the ability to distinguish between its regulatory responsibilities and its tasks as administrator of the District of Columbia's airports.

The FAA is using its regulatory powers to coerce airlines into using the new Dulles International Airport, which the FAA runs, instead of Friendship International, operated by the Port of Baltimore Authority. The airlines, absolutely dependent on the Agency's scheduling and fare decisions, can scarcely resist the pressure to shift their service.

The problem started when the FAA discovered that Washington's National Airport was overcrowded--a discovery hastened somewhat on an unforgettable afternoon several years ago when an aerial traffic jam over the Capital threw the entire East into chaos and put every flight on the coast two hours behind schedule. The airlines began scheduling their flights through Friendship, located midway between Baltimore and Washington.

But the FAA does not run Friendship, and it does not regard it as a Washington airport. Apparently unhappy because it did not have administrative control over the new center of Washington's long-haul traffic, the FAA decided to build a new airport (which nobody wanted) in the middle of Virginia (where nobody wanted it) to forestall the possibility of Friendship becoming overcrowded (which nobody but the FAA anticipated).

Dulles will be just a little closer to Washington than Friendship, but on the opposite side from Baltimore. From Baltimore's view, the site represents a real technical achievement: the most inconvenient possible location. Since Baltimore is somewhat larger than Washington, the airlines were almost as displeased as the Baltimoreans: having two airports to service cities forty miles apart made little sense to anyone but the FAA.

The FAA is aggrandizing its administrative powers by pressuring through its regulatory functions. An airline wanting permission to fly lucrative routes is obviously in a poor position if it has refused to transfer its services to Dulles. And since the FAA has now committed itself by building Dulles, the Agency's position is unlikely to change. There is no graft; no money changes hands; there is only the subtle corruption of the conflict of interest built into the FAA's responsibilities for Washington's air service. For an industry like the airlines, in which growing Federal control is the only alternative to chaos, Dulles is an alarming precedent, and, as the outraged citizens of Baltimore have discovered, there's precious little to be done.