A Conversation With Jeffrey N. Shane

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!