RICHARD BRANSON may have to ditch his accent, renounce his loyalty to the British crown and drape himself in a U.S. flag. Driving a Mustang may help too. That's apparently what it will take for U.S. authorities to allow Virgin America, the nascent U.S. airline that bears his popular brand name, to get off the ground.
It was partly Branson's British citizenship that provoked the U.S. Department of Transportation on Wednesday to tentatively declare California-based Virgin America insufficiently American to do business in the U.S. In addition to not being under the "actual control" of U.S. citizens, the department found, Virgin America also violates the federal ban on foreign ownership of airlines because noncitizens control too much of it.
Thus was illustrated, yet again, the absurdity of this nation's ban on the foreign ownership of U.S.-based airlines. The department said that because Branson recruited Chief Executive Fred Reid and licensed the airline under his Virgin brand name, Virgin America isn't under the actual control of U.S. citizens. Yet under any definition of either "citizenship" or "control," it's a patently ridiculous finding. Two-thirds of Virgin America's board of directors are U.S. citizens; so are Reid and the airline's chairman.
But the foreign ownership ban is so ironclad that, for the federal government's purposes, Virgin America can be grounded because of a license agreement to use a British brand name.
