Say what you will, the airline industry in the United States is nowhere close to being a free, competitive market. After a protracted struggle with the FAA, Virgin Atlantic was recently cleared to begin flying intra-U.S. routes, beginning late this year.

It shouldn’t have taken this long.

Also, from my NWA WorldPerks e-mail this morning:

The Department of Transportation (DOT) plans to award a limited number of new routes to China between 2007 and 2009. Northwest Airlines is asking the DOT for authority to fly Detroit-Shanghai nonstop service beginning in 2007 and Detroit-Beijing nonstop service beginning in 2009. If selected to operate the new routes, more than 100 U.S. cities will enjoy convenient, single connection service to China through Northwest’s WorldGateway hub at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the premier international connecting airport in the U.S.

The body of the message begs for me to sign a petition, in hopes that with enough signatures, NWA might be granted some of these lucrative flights. Now, if China wants to limit the number of inbound flights from Detroit – or any other U.S. city – there’s not much we can do about it. Would it be stupid? Probably. But this is what I’d expect from the People’s Republic.

Clearly, the domestic carriers see either unmet demand or potential demand for trans-Pacific flights to China – else they wouldn’t be begging their customers for support in their attempts to gain political favors. The DOT is not a group of entrepreneurs and there isn’t much reason to think that they have the slightest amount of business acumen. Let the airlines fly the routes they see fit, bound of course by the destination airport’s capacity to accept inbound flights, which of course requires the airlines and their customers to weigh the opportunity costs involved. This doesn’t need to be a bureaucratic decision.