Airlines

Matthew Petti | 9.3.2024 4:04 PM

Airlines have a very strong incentive not to risk their planes getting shot out of the sky. And it's not just a hypothetical fear.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean passenger jet and the United States shot down an Iranian passenger jet, both mistaken for hostile military aircraft, killing hundreds of people. During more recent conflicts, Russian-backed militias shot down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014 and the Iranian military shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet over Iran in 2020.

So when Israel and Iran started rattling the saber at each other last month, foreign airlines took no chances. Many companies suspended service to Israel as well as neighboring Lebanon, which has been in a low-intensity border war with Israel, and Jordan, which was in the path of a previous Iranian air raid on Israel.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) believes that this risk calculation is really an act of "discrimination against the Jewish State." In a letter first reported by Jewish Insider, he demanded that American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines "restore air travel to Israel" unless the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says otherwise.

"Airlines should be prohibited from effectively boycotting or otherwise discriminating against the world's only Jewish State. It is one thing to temporarily suspend air travel to Israel on security grounds as defined by the FAA," wrote Torres. "But to unilaterally suspend air travel indefinitely until mid-2025, as American Airlines has done, has the practical effect of a boycott."

Israeli and Emirati airlines are continuing to operate in Israel, noted Torres, so the real effect of the cancellations is that American travelers in Israel are "at the mercy of a de facto monopoly that can easily gouge prices with impunity."

Torres did not mention the flight cancellations to Jordan or Lebanon, both of........

© Reason.com