Sister Cities linked back together again: Sydney and San Fran

Los Angeles should not be lamenting the loss of eight weekly flights of Qantas to San Francisco. Those flights are simply going back to Sydney’s sister city of San Francisco after an 11 year absence. San Francisco was Qantas’ first U.S. mainland destination and proudly served the City by the Bay from 1954 until 1995. You can read about it here.

I checked the facts- it's five flights a week LAX is losing to SFO, not eight. Where did the LA Times get the other three? Perhaps the three weekly extension flights from SFO to Vancouver, Canada? The Vancouver flights never went through LAX.

For a decade, SFO’s loss was LAX’s gain. However, did Los Angeles really gain anything financially with Qantas transfer passengers who may have had a two-hour layover before going on a connecting flight to somewhere else in Mayor Sam’s America? Maybe some these transfer passengers spent enough money to cover one hour’s living wage of an airport concessions employee at Starbuck’s or McDonald’s? We might task Walter Moore to find a real economist to answer that question!

Last year, Los Angeles did get one thing from Qantas: a maintenance base for Boeing 747 aircraft that is the only one outside of Australia for Qantas. How quickly the politicians forget!

Some politicians today also have forgotten that it was the administration of this old, dead Republican mayor that the City of Los Angeles acquired Ontario International Airport and Palmdale Intercontinental Airport in the 1960’s. The visionary Clifton Moore, who became Executive Director of the Los Angeles Department of Airports while I was Mayor, dreamed up what we hear people like Mayor Villaraigosa and Councilmen Rosendahl, Parks and Weiss today call, “the regional approach.”

We purchased Palmdale to handle the Super Sonic Transport, but then the U.S. Senate killed the U.S. SST program by a margin of one vote in 1971. We did build a small passenger terminal in Palmdale to handle flights to LAX, Inyokern and Ridgecrest. (When United Express begins its flights out of Palmdale to San Francisco this June, please be sure to look for my name on the terminal dedication plaque!)

L.A. officials should not whine about “losing” flights to other cities. Los Angeles can play the same game of offering airlines incentives as other airports have done. The new Palmdale service is a good example of financial incentives. Ontario also offers great growth opportunities with a customs hall for international flights and a new runway capable of handling the Airbus A380. Just look at ExpressJet’s selection of Ontario as a western base of operations.

If the airlines are balking and suing about higher fees at LAX, then DOA (that’s what we used to call it then) should make incentives to the airlines to increase their usage of Ontario or “LA/Ontario” as it’s now named.

Blog away, dum dums!

Additional Information:

• Click here for a newsletter which details the expansion of three weekly Qantas flights from SFO to Vancouver, Canada.
• Ramp up from 3 to 5 weekly flights SFO-SYD, 12/18/2006
• SFO-YVR flight added, 5/3/2006
• SF Board of Supes commends Qantas, 3/2/06
• Qantas announces LAX maintenance base and A380 will fly to LAX, 2/1/06
• More press