Christie's relationships with first-class flying and his BFF ex-Port Authority chairman David Samson have collided in mid-air:
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NorthJersey.com 2/5/15: Federal prosecutors have demanded that the Port Authority turn over records related to the personal travel of the agency’s former chairman, David Samson, as well as his relationship with Newark Liberty International Airport’s largest carrier, United Airlines...
(A) subpoena issued last month appears to be part of a probe into a flight route initiated by United while Samson was chairman of the transportation agency that operates the region’s airports. The route provided non-stop service between Newark and Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina — about 50 miles from a home where Samson often spent weekends...United halted the non-stop route on April 1 of last year, just three days after Samson resigned under a cloud...
United Airlines was in regular negotiations with the Port Authority and the Christie administration during Samson’s tenure over issues that included expansion of the airline’s service to Atlantic City and the extension of the PATH train to Newark Liberty...
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NorthJersey.com 2/11/15: Dan Mann, executive director of Columbia Metropolitan Airport, said in an interview that the twice-a-week Newark-Columbia flights — leaving on Thursdays and returning on Mondays — were unusual for a large carrier like United. He also said he was surprised that the route lasted as long as it did, 19 months, given the relatively low demand for it...
Samson, the co-founder of a powerful law firm in West Orange, a former state attorney general, and a key adviser to Governor Christie, referred to the route as “the chairman’s flight,” one source said...
“It was not performing well, and it hadn’t performed well from the start,” Mann said. He said he had no reason to believe there was any ulterior motive behind the flight route until he read recent news stories about the federal investigation...
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Well, it certainly isn't David Samson's fault that the flights were only half full: it's United's fault for not employing the obvious solution of using planes with
half the seating capacity, duh!
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Joe Brancatelli, editor of a non-commercial business travel website...noted that United did little, if anything, to publicize the new route...
Mann said...he had no reason to believe there was any ulterior motive behind the flight route until he read recent news stories about the federal investigation...(H)e assumed United had a business reason for maintaining the route...He said he did not remember whether United representatives had raised the idea of starting the new route. But he said he and airport officials had not prepared a “business plan” for the route, a common practice when trying to convince an airline to add new service to the airport.
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A standard operating procedure in which he obviously should have been involved was not followed? Well, well -- isn't that EXACTLY how Bridge(t)-Gate got started?