Professor Brian Havel's Opening Remarks
This message is based on Professor Havel's introductory and closing remarks at the interview of Mr. Shane.
I am pleased to welcome you to this website and to the webcast
below. This is the sixth installment of the Institute's oral history
program, "Conversations with Aviation Leaders," which explores the
origins, history, record, and future direction of U.S. airline
deregulation as told through the voices and memories of its
participants.
Our format today, as it has been in the past, will be
three one-hour sessions, and we'll be paying special attention in this
program to the emergence and implementation of an ambitious U.S. effort
to extend at least some of the features of domestic airline deregulation
to the international sphere, through a policy known as "Open Skies."
But today's guest I hope will travel back with us to the period before
the arrival of the formal Open Skies policy in the early 1990s and help
us to understand the first stirrings of international air transport
liberalization during the preceding decade. In this first hour, we'll
be looking at some of the background to deregulation and some of the
early liberalization efforts that preceded Open Skies in the 1990s.
Interview - Jeffrey N. Shane (Part 1 of 3)
My guest today, to talk about all of these things, is Jeffrey N.
Shane, who was described by one of our previous interviewees, Bob
Crandall, as one of the principal movers of U.S. transportation and
aviation policy for many years, and by another of our interviewees,
former chief aviation negotiator John Byerly, in his conversation with
us in October 2010, as "one of the great thinkers at the forefront of
aviation policy." A person who can "step back from the trees and see
the whole forest, able to articulate tough ideas in understandable
terms, and in many ways the originator of the Open Skies concept and the
person who drove it forward." We'll see, Jeff, if that turns out to be
a valid claim as we chat this morning!
Jeffrey Shane has a distinguished career in both public service
and private legal practice. He served in a number of policymaking
capacities at the Department of Transportation, and he was also chief
aviation negotiator for a period of time at the Department of State.
All of that happened between 1979 and 1993, and he returned to
government service in 2002, serving until 2008 and culminating in his
appointment as Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy between 2003
and 2008. This gave him a critical role in the emergence of the
historic 2007 U.S.-EU Air Transport Agreement.
Interview - Jeffrey N. Shane (Part 2 of 3)
Jeff holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a
law degree from Columbia Law School, where he was Articles Editor of the
Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. He is currently a partner
with the Hogan Lovells law firm in Washington, DC, where his practice
is principally devoted to domestic and international transportation
issues, with particular focus on strategic, regulatory, legislative, and
transactional advice and representation.He's the recipient of many professional recognitions, including
Aviation Week's L. Welch Pogue Award for lifetime achievement in
aviation, which I think is the top award in this field, for those who
have served the international aviation industry. And I was, myself, in
the visitors' gallery of the International Civil Aviation Organization
in Montreal in 2007 when Jeff Shane took the gavel as the first American
to serve as President of the ICAO Triennial Assembly since 1959. That
was quite an achievement.
Interview - Jeffrey N. Shane (Part 3 of 3)
There's a great deal more to say about you, Jeff, including your
service as a Professor of International Transportation Law for a period
at Georgetown University, but that would simply prolong my words of
introduction, and we need to hear from you!I hope to have given in these introductory remarks a flavor to
our audience of your commanding professional involvement in the
evolution of U.S. aviation law and policy. Again, welcome to the
International Aviation Law Institute, and welcome back to Chicago!