This is one of the main findings put forward by the report on “Transatlantic airline alliances: competitive issues and regulatory approaches” as a result of a joint research made by the European Commission and the US Department of Transportation. This joint research was aimed at deepening the understanding of transatlantic air services and provide a foundation for substantive cooperation between the Commission and the DOT in the competitive assessment of airline alliances.

The report on “Transatlantic airline alliances: competitive issues and regulatory approaches” carried out by the European Commission and the US Department of Transportation (DOT) summarises the main findings of the project launched in March 2008 as a first step to develop a common EU-US understanding of trends in the airline industry in order to promote compatible approaches on competition issues. This first step is also part of the implementation of the EU-US Air Transport Agreement which has been applied as of the end of March 2008, pending ratification, and aimed to enhance competition by allowing, for the first time, EU or US airlines to serve any routes between Europe and the United States.

The report describes the evolution of the aviation industry in the two jurisdictions, explains the emergence of alliances and discusses the most recent trends. It also compares the respective legal regimes in the EU and US and the analytical frameworks for competition review applied by the Commission and the DOT.

The project related only to passenger transport. It was carried out in two phases:

1. First “qualitative” phase included individual meetings with EU and U.S. Carriers, selected in a representative way to include both allied and non-allied carriers, and representatives of the global aviation alliances.
2. Second “quantitative” phase was an econometric assessment of the Passenger Origin-Destination (“O&D”) Survey data collected by DOT. The results of the quantitative assessment helped both authorities to better understand the likely effects on price and capacity resulting from various forms of cooperation in transatlantic markets.

The report concludes that the respective analytical approaches to airline competition matters employed by the Commission and DOT are already largely compatible. Both authorities recognise the importance of continued discussions to deepen their mutual understanding of the competitive structure of the industry. Further, the authorities recognise the importance of continuous cooperation on remedies with the view to avoiding, where possible, conflicting or unnecessarily duplicative remedies in the case of parallel reviews of the same transaction.

Given the dynamic nature of the industry, cooperation between the authorities has to be a continuous process. EU and the US will, therefore, continue their efforts to foster a common understanding of the competitive dynamics of the airline industry and will seek to refine and build upon the existing quantitative work initiated by this project.