Newark-Columbia flight scandal ‘surreal’ to airport director

In January 2012, the executive director of Columbia Metropolitan Airport was at the Chicago headquarters of United Airlines, trying to buck up service between South Carolina’s capital and the Windy City.

But during the meeting – out of the blue and to Dan Mann’s surprise – the United schedulers offered an unlikely new route to Newark, N.J., their lucrative hub. The officials said they had an “aircraft utilization” need – meaning they had an aircraft that was being underused and they wanted to add a Thursday night flight from New Jersey to Columbia and Monday morning flight from Columbia to New Jersey.

OK, Mann thought. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

“Airlines don’t typically give you service you don’t ask for, or haven’t made a case for in the past,” he told The State newspaper on Thursday. “But it wasn’t so weird that it was like ‘What’s going on?’ So I thought, ‘Yeah. Absolutely. We could use more capacity in New York.’”

Little did Mann know that the seemingly innocuous offer would place his small airport at the center of a scandal that last week cost United Airline’s chief executive his job. Nor did Mann know that the flights would become part of a federal probe into whether United created them at the request of the then-chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, David Samson, to travel to his home in Aiken’s historic district on the weekends.

Samson was the same Port Authority chairman who resigned in 2014 amid accusations he had helped orchestrate the “bridgegate” lane closings in New Jersey linked to the office of governor and now presidential candidate Chris Christie, a Samson ally.

“When this story broke, I thought it was unbelievable,” Mann said. “You hear about this kind of stuff in other places. But to have it happen in your market is surreal.”

‘Chairman’s flight’ only half full

The story unfolds like this:

On Tuesday, United Airlines abruptly replaced Chief Executive Jeffery Smisek and two other senior executives as a federal investigation continued into whether the airline gave preferential treatment to Samson by scheduling the flights.

The flights were created as United, the dominant airline at Newark Liberty International Airport, was negotiating with the Port Authority over projects at the airport, particularly a potential $1.5 billion authority project to extend a commuter train system from Manhattan to the airline’s hub.

Samson and his wife, Joanna, in 2009 had bought a reported $1.7 million two-story home in Aiken, on Colleton Avenue near the cusp of the city’s historic and horse districts.

The home, built in the early 20th century, is typical of the city’s “winter colony” heritage, involving rich New Englanders who would come south in the winter. They founded the area’s horse racing, polo and golf traditions, according to Aiken City Council member Philip Merry, who represents the historic district.

“I was in the house years ago,” he said. “And the house was extremely well-restored before the Samsons bought it. It’s a nice place.”

According to Mann, the flights would conveniently arrive on Thursday evenings and depart on Monday mornings. Aiken is only 50 miles from Columbia’s airport, and Bloomberg reported Samson had complained that prior to the Columbia flight, he had to fly into Charlotte, about 100 miles farther.

A small Canadair CRJ-200 aircraft was used for the “chairman’s flight,” as Samson called it, according to a New Jersey newspaper. The model is a 50-seat commuter aircraft with a single line of seats on the left side of the aircraft and two lines on the right.

The flights were usually half-full, Mann said, with 25 or 26 passengers.

“We worried about it not getting the ridership it needed to be sustained,” he said. The airline’s response “was nonchalant,” Mann said. “They’d say ‘We would like to have more riders, but it’s aircraft utilization.”

‘They asked what we knew and when we knew it’

Mann said because the flight was linked to United’s hub, it was valuable for transfers to more expensive flights. “There are so many things that go into keeping a route or not keeping a route,” he said.

However, if that was true, the fact the flights were scheduled only twice a week was odd, Mann said.

“Usually only ultra-low-cost carriers will do that, for vacation destinations like Vegas,” he said. “You don’t normally see a legacy carrier do it in a market like this.”

Mann said despite Samson’s prominence in the New York-New Jersey political scene, “he was a completely anonymous passenger here. I never met him.”

United ended the flight on April 1 – April Fool’s Day – 2014, just three days after Samson resigned from the Port Authority amid the bridgegate controversy.

Samson has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing, nor have any United executives, according to the Associated Press.

And Mann added that while he met with federal investigators in May 2014 shortly after the flight was canceled, he didn’t have much to tell them.

“They asked what we knew and when we knew it,” he said. “There was nothing from us. (The investigators) said we were just a runway and terminal for the aircraft. I don’t think there is going to be anything else on this end.”

Mann added that the whole thing has been bizarre.

“We were glad to have the service for as long as it lasted,” he said. “But you talk about a closely guarded secret! It’s been fascinating.”

This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 7:22 PM with the headline "Newark-Columbia flight scandal ‘surreal’ to airport director."