1.   A House panel voted Wednesday to loosen anti-trust laws so that competing airlines could coordinate their arrival and departure schedules as a way of ending airport gridlock.

2.   British Airways will continue to dominate Heathrow but it will not be able to coordinate pricing and scheduling with American, as competing airline alliances now do.

3.   But industry experts, several senators and the head of a competing airline disagreed, arguing that the mergers could result in less competition and fewer choices for flyers.

4.   Competing airlines condemned the decision.

5.   Competing airlines are seeking to maximize profits by bunching flights together at peak periods of travel during the day, he said.

6.   Even if users find cheaper fares on competing airlines, they may use the United service to make those flight reservations, he said.

7.   Faced with limited competition and high air fares, companies there are doing what they can to keep alive a competing airline.

8.   He said Japan Airlines will attract more customers as the strong dollar makes competing U.S. airlines more expensive and as more Japanese travel.

9.   Humans on the ground, not the pilots of competing airlines in the sky, will still have to decide who goes first, he said.

10.   It was the culmination of a costly lobbying campaign in which competing airlines pushed regulators to extract as many concessions as possible from American and British Airways.