Babbitt at Eclat

President Obama’s pick for FAA Administrator, Randy Babbitt, used to run Eclat Consulting. I knew I’d seen that name before, and sure enough, a quick search of the hard drive found four reports from Eclat.

I can’t really recommend any of them unless you’re a serious aviation nerd. Some of them are in the form of slide presentations so they only hit the highlights. However, Mr. Babbitt did actually co-author a couple of pieces in the Aviation Daily Arrivals Articles (a big .pdf file.) The articles are from back in 2004 so they might provide you with some historical perspective also.

I will say that at least one person at Eclat appears to have the Flick. Again, it’s a slide presentation (in the form of a .pdf file) so it’s hard to say what the details were but the highlights were correct.

Airline Strategy Impacts on Airports

Presented by:
Robert A. Hazel


”5: AND STILL THEY KEEP COMING . . . “

The gist being, no matter how bad the forecast or conditions, people keep forming new airlines, furthering destructive competition.


”9: AND EVEN A LITTLE GROWTH CREATES GRIDLOCK AT THE CONGESTED AIRPORTS “

What I can’t tell from the presentations is whether or not Mr. Hazel recognizes that we need to limit the number of scheduled aircraft at the high-demand airports (slots) or if he is one of those guys that believes satellites will somehow magically create more runway capacity.

Don Brown
March 31, 2009