Court Opinion

ID: 8996854
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-27 12:46:17.140628+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:11:05.428850
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Chief Judge,
dissenting from failure to grant en banc rehearing.
(Filed May 7, 1992)
The majority opinion, as Judge Nelson points out in dissent, creates a direct conflict with the Seventh Circuit on the question of allocating the costs of airport firefighting and rescue services. This is an important issue. Most major airports allocate these costs, which are substantial, to the airlines. The effect of our opinion is to hold invalid the cost allocation system at airports across the country. There is a great need for uniformity here. Before we require the Supreme Court to resolve this conflict in the circuits, we should hear the case en banc.
The Seventh Circuit in Indianapolis Airport v. American Airlines, 733 F.2d 1262, 1271 (1984), said:
The first [of the airline’s contentions] is that the ordinance should have allocated the costs of firefighting services in proportion to the number of fires experienced by each class of users of the airport’s facilities over some reasonable period of time rather than mainly to the airlines. We disagree. The airport has elaborate firefighting facilities not in order to enable it to respond to a grease fire in a hamburger stand or a car fire in the parking lot but to protect the airlines and their passengers should a plane catch on fire in a crash or other accident. Airport costs that would not be avoided if a particular class of users stopped using the airport (i.e., the concessionaires) are not costs imposed on the airport by those users, and therefore are not properly allocable to them. Cf. Illinois v. ICC, 722 F.2d 1341, 1346 (7th Cir.1983). Thus the bulk of the firefighting costs are properly allocable to the airlines.
Our Court’s opinion takes this authority away from the airports in conflict with this reasoning. This is a seriously mistaken view. As a matter of policy, most regional airports want to keep some general aviation on the field for a variety of reasons. The general aviation fleet, the number of new pilots and other similar statistics are in serious decline. Our court’s decision which attempts to control the allocation of costs at such airports will make the matter worse and hasten what is already a very serious problem for the future of aviation.