AAI’s Moss Joins the ABA 2021 Air & Space Forum to Discuss Airline Competition and Sustainability

AAI’s Diana Moss joined the ABA’s 2021 Air & Space Forum to discuss Antitrust Aspects of Sustainability Cooperation & Competition. Her remarks addressed the threshold issue of sustainability and environmental management in the aviation industry and how it relates to competition enforcement and policy. Moss explored major questions that should animate the debate as policymakers and the aviation industry pursue sustainability goals within the confines of existing antitrust law. These questions include conflicts between aviation and sustainability goals, such as liberalization goals, the economic-operational airline alliance model, and high domestic and alliance market concentration. Moss explained that industry initiatives to tackle sustainability objectives can breach competition rules involving collaborations with competitors and the airlines’ full and partial acquisitions of sustainability assets along the supply chain. She noted that competition enforcers and transportation sector regulators face challenges in balancing anticompetitive concerns around coordinated sustainability initiatives and the harder-to-quantify, longer term economic benefits from sustainability. She concluded that various antitrust immunities – existing or prospective – would cut either way in terms of pro-sustainability or anti-sustainability objectives and that high domestic concentration complicates this landscape.