It's possible to calculate how much United's bribe of Samson cost the carrier by comparing the telltale flight to more profitable routes
How much might the "chairman's flight" have cost United Airlines?
About $10,000 a week in lost revenue, estimates a veteran aviation industry analyst.
The round-trip flight from Newark to Columbia, S.C. was the subject of scrutiny by the U.S. Attorney's office as part of its investigation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Former Port Authority Chairman David Samson pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of bribery for accepting a benefit worth more than $5,000 from the airline. The plea involved the circumstances around Samson's request that the airline reinstate a cancelled route to and from a South Carolina airport near his second home.
United, which is the largest carrier flying out of Newark Liberty International Airport, operated a flight to South Carolina on Thursday nights only, with a return flight Monday mornings. The flights were offered no other days of the week.
Federal transportation records showed the flights were never full, averaging just 25 passengers. In a email exchanged included in a related criminal complaint, an unnamed United employee wrote the flight "never worked financially."
Within days of Samson's sudden retirement as Port Authority chairman in April, 2014, United ended the unprofitable flights.
In his guilty plea, Samson admitted he blocked Port Authority approval of a United construction project at the airport to coerce United into reinstating the flights.
Bob McAdoo, the former chief financial officer for the Newark-based People Airlines, and a long-time aviation industry analyst, said it was possible to estimate the revenue United sacrificed by running the flight.
To do so, he compared the low revenue generated by the Columbia flight versus the average revenue United would receive from a flight of comparable distance. That would show how much United could've made by repositioning the plane and its crew to a more lucrative market.
In total, he explained, the service to Columbia involved four flights: The first one, late Thursday afternoon, to South Carolina; a return flight later in the evening to get the plane back to Newark; a flight down Sunday night so a plane would be available first thing Monday morning; and the returning flight Monday morning.
McAdoo crunched the federal transportation data on passenger load for the Columbia route versus the Charleston route - a destination he selected because mileage to that airport was roughly comparable.
Based on the difference in passenger load, the decision to run the Columbia trips cost the airline about $10,000 a week in lost revenue, he calculated.
And that figure doesn't include the cost of putting up the crew on Sunday night so they'd be in place for the flight early Monday morning, he said.
The existence of such an arrangement would surely have been noticed by United employees, McAdoo said.
"It's not like this was a secret, because the scheduling was so unusual, and there was no other market in the world in which this company operated in this manner," he said. "That's not a pattern of service that's attractive to the general marketplace."
At a press conference Thursday, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman would not estimate how much the flight cost the airline, but he did say Samson paid for his ticket when he flew.
"Coach," said Fishman. "All the seating was coach. These were not big planes."
Kathleen O'Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.