Return to CAB Era?

A curious NY Times story from earlier this week, Start-Up Airline Idles on a California Runway, Stymied by Bureaucracy, describes the complaints of a 95 year-old entrepreneur who has been thus far unable to secure an operating certificate for California Pacific Airlines. The slant of the article is extremely sympathetic to the individual, a Mr. Vallas, and clearly implies the blame for his stalled airline lies at the feet of the sluggish F.A.A. bureaucracy. This tone struck me as strange given that the article quotes an F.A.A. letter describing the documentation Mr. Vallas submitted in support of his application for an operating certificate as "incomplete, inaccurate and do not appear to have been reviewed for quality." The author of the story appears to give no consideration to the possibility that perhaps Mr. Vallas' application was deserving of rejection. While nobody wants a return to era when the federal government rejected any new entrants into the air services market on the grounds that new carriers were not in the nation's interest, those rules have long since been abolished. That the F.A.A. still requires certain criteria to be met to ensure that the prospective operators of a new airline have adequate managerial experience, financial backing, and clean legal and safety backgrounds is hardly cause for complaint. It is possible that those criteria are being enforced too rigidly, but this story provides scant evidence in support of such a claim.