Norwegian Air Shuttle renews its attempt to obtain US rights for NAI. Part 1: the arguments

On 1-Jun-2015, Norwegian made another attempt at asking the US Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow its Irish-registered subsidiary, Norwegian Air International (NAI), to operate transatlantic routes under the EU-US open skies agreement. NAI's case, filed in Dec-2013 and completed in Feb-2014, has been pending for longer than any other such application.

To address its opponents' stated concerns that NAI is a "flag of convenience", whose only purpose is "social dumping", Norwegian now says that it will employ pilots and cabin crew only from Europe and the US. If there was a clear reason to deny the application, surely this would have been decided by now. Many informed parties, including the European Commission, the lead negotiators of the EU-US agreement, consumer and trade organisations and competitor airlines do not believe that there is such a reason.

Meanwhile the DOT has allowed itself to be hijacked by the anti-competitive agenda of the Big Three US airlines and a number of labour unions. In this report, we outline the arguments surrounding this case. In a second part, we will look at the impact of Norwegian's transatlantic operations on competitors' traffic share.