ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, regulation of airline service in the United States sought to suppress the threat of competition. Emboldened by the results of this experiment with 'deregulation', the Congress codified these and even more sweeping reforms–including eventual elimination of the regulatory agency itself–in the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. After 'grandfathering' the route authority of the 16 airlines holding it in 1938, the CAB precluded entry into service by new carriers, refusing nearly one hundred petitions for new service between its establishment in 1938 and the onset of deregulation in the mid-1970s. In the Spring of 1975, newly-appointed Civil Aeronautics Board chairman John Robson proposed an experiment that would permit new and existing airlines to begin or end service on selected routes without prior Civil Aeronautics Board approval, a dramatic departure from the progressively tighter regulatory policies advocated by his immediate predecessors.
