American Air CEO assails Delta on air traffic control plan

American Airlines’s top executive lashed out at Delta for splitting with other US carriers that support a proposal to privatize the nation’s air-traffic-control system. Delta “doesn’t see what everybody else in the industry sees” about an issue that’s central to airlines’ future, American CEO Doug Parker said Tuesday. Parker, who used a recent speech to the US. Chamber of Commerce to lobby for privatization, made his latest comments during a question and answer session at the CAPA Americas Aviation Summit in Las Vegas. The division over air traffic control isn’t the first time Delta has split with other US airlines. Delta said in October that it would leave Airlines for America, in part because the industry trade group hadn’t taken a strong stance regarding competition from Persian Gulf carriers. “Why is it that Delta believes something different that no other airline believes?” Parker said. “I don’t think it’s because they have different facts. I think it’s because they have a different agenda. What’s best for Delta is for the rest of us to live in an environment that is relatively more harmful to us than to them.”<br/>