19. Department of Transportation · Notable
Initiate a rulemaking on airport slot-pair allocation
Printed page 631 19. Department of Transportation
“Initiate a rulemaking to allocate slot-pairs more consistently to airlines at capacity-controlled airports on the primary basis of safety, maximizing capacity, and competition.”
What has happened
- Not started
No rulemaking on slot-pair allocation has been initiated. A full-text search of the Federal Register since 2025-01-20 returns zero documents for "slot pairs" and zero for "capacity-controlled airports", and DOT's 2026 regulatory agenda contains no slot rulemaking. What DOT and the FAA did instead was manage capacity case by case through operating-limitation orders: targeted scheduling limits at Newark (interim order 2025-05-23, order 2025-06-10, extended 2025-09-29), scheduling limits at Chicago O'Hare (2026-04-20 and 2026-04-27, after two request-for-information meetings), and extensions of the existing high-density orders at JFK and LaGuardia to 2028 (2026-06-23). These allocate operating authority, but none of them is a rulemaking, and none revisits the basis on which slot pairs are allocated between incumbents and entrants.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Boundary call, flagged in
.scratch/research-phase/spot-checks.md. not started because the Quote asks for a rulemaking on the basis of allocation and none was initiated. A reader who treated the O’Hare and Newark scheduling orders — which do allocate operations, with notice and comment-like request-for-information meetings — as the initiation of the process would say attempted. The orders are issued under the FAA’s existing high-density authority and change no allocation rule, which is why the lower rung is recorded. - The JFK and LaGuardia orders of 2026-06-23 are published as rules but are extensions of the 2008 JFK order and its LaGuardia counterpart to 2028, not new allocation rulemakings.
- Shares the pp. 630–631 aviation block; see the cluster negative search in
docs/research/ch-19.md.
- Action
- issue
- Object
- Slot allocation rules at capacity-controlled airports
- ID
- 1729