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5/ How international airline fares and rates are made

therefore, the Conferences meet once a year -- in the slack Fall trvel season -- to consider agreement's for the international traffic year beginning the next April 1

[[underline]] Year-round study [[/underline]]

Processing of Conference subjects, however, goes on throughout the 12 months. Just as one new traffic year begins, the Cost Sub-Committees meet to survey experience and trends of costs as the necessary basis for the next year's fares and rates  A short time later, the airlines exchange their tentative proposals and explore their implications in the Fares, Rates & Charges Sub-Committee. Meanwhile, the working groups have been processing other recommendations and joint studies, and all of these form the agenda of composite Conference in September or October.

The composite session becomes the focus of all of the effort to achieve the coordination which this form of public service requires, and the cockpit of the competition between individual carriers and individual countries. It should not be thought that the Conference system eliminates competition. Actually, it channels and concentrates it, so that prices, theories, forecasts and ideas can be pitted against one another in debate and adjusted in agreement around the Conference table. It is a less expensive and more satisfactory alternative to the successive stages of price war, cutting corners on service, increased government subsidy and intervention which would only end up in the same place - government agreement around a table to stabilize fares and rates. Whatever the subject, and however brisk the debate, the result of Conference discussion must be an adjustment between all of the factors and interests concerned, reached by a compromise sufficiently satisfactory to gain unanimous vote. 

Once the Conference is over, the Secretaries must complete the voluminous record and circulate it to airlines, who in turn submit the resolutions to their own governments, usually in late October and November. If and when governments approve, the airlines then prepare detailed tariffs for their actual offering to the public. But if one government should disapprove, the resolution concerned cannot come into force. 

[[underline]] Position of the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board [[/underline]]

In this process of government approval, the situation of the airlines and the government of the United States is a peculiar one. While privately owned, air transport in the U.S. is subject to a very high degree of government control. This is the outcome of a troubled history of domestic public utility regulation which has crystalized in the theory of 'regulated competition' as the happy medium between government ownership and free enterprise. As American carriers have expanded into the international sphere, the U.S. government's close interest and supervision have accompanied them.

Under the present U.S. Civil Aeronautics Act, the Civil Aeronautics Board has complete authority over domestic fares and rates. In international