ABSTRACT
The airline industry continues to remain highly regulated in all manner of ways; it would be naive to expect anything different given safe travel is the desired outcome. The notion the sustainable, strongly competitive markets can be achieved universally without any form of economic regulatory control is Utopian and in the light of experience unrealistic. In Norway, the coexistence of Braathens and SAS was ensured for over three decades by regulators limiting the routes each could serve and dictating how much capacity each could provide. With all economic controls removed, the more powerful carrier, SAS, has been able to attract more and more of the higher yielding traffic. Where market forces have been shown to produce sustainable competitive conditions, regulatory intervention would be clearly counterproductive and as such should be rightly regarded as interference. Moving the regulatory pendulum back a little from its totally free market stop point would seem to be justified.
