Senate Appropriations Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi) and Vice Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), as well as Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), recently sent a letter to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation opposing privatizing the nation’s air traffic control system.
The letter comes as airlines have redoubled their lobbying efforts to take away Congressional oversight of the air traffic control system and put it under a board dominated by private interests.
According to the letter:
The public would not be well-served by exempting any part of the FAA from annual congressional oversight. A privatized system would provide consumers with no recourse for complaints or mistreatment, as it currently does through the Department of Transportation or their members of Congress. The annual appropriations process provides the oversight of agency resources necessary to ensure accountability for program performance and a sustained focus on aviation safety.”
In addition, the letter states, ”annual oversight also ensures that the FAA maintains a system that works throughout the aviation industry, including for general aviation, small and rural communities, commercial airlines, and large metropolitan cities.”
The full letter can be viewed here.
The naysayers always seem to make the argument that if ATC is privatized it will drive up costs and drive the little guys, aka GA, out of business. It seems to me that the FAA has been doing quite well as the government typically does at driving up costs while taking forever to make any meaningful and lasting changes to the NAS. And how would privatizing ATC make it any less safe? Congressional oversight has done little if anything to make the NAS safer and more efficient. Congress has become little more than a bunch of squabbling children since the recent election with one group bound and determined to block anything the current administration tries to do with no concern for what’s best for the nation rather what’s best for them and their well feathered nests. I would at least like to see what is proposed before shooting it down based on hypothetical scenarios that proclaim the sky will fall if ATC is privatized.
Privatization will do nothing for the air traffic control system. The National Airspace System is a national, Public asset and cannot be run piecemeal. In other words, it can be a private monopoly or it can be run by the national Government (like it ought to be.) Anyone that suggests otherwise is trying to deny the simple reality of the facts.
The suggestion that some entity can do it better is also a denial of reality. It can be done cheaper. It can’t be done cheaper and safer — not on a system this size. Again, the facts speak for themselves. The U.S. of A. runs the largest, most complex and, yet, safest air traffic control system is the world. Period.
Are there problems? You bet there are. Can the FAA do better? Of course it can. And believe me, the pressure is always there to make sure the FAA does. But the overarching pressure is — and must always be — to run a SAFE system.
The safe, orderly and expeditious movement of air traffic is the literal definition of air traffic control. The words are in that order for a reason. The words “cheap” and “profit” are not included. For good reason.
Don Brown
But if we let the FAA continue down this road, they will make Part 91 safer by causing it to be priced out of existence.
And then the airlines will all start screaming because they will have to pay the total cost of getting a person from nothing to ATP.
We must also have the FAA have a change in thinking. Their Motto needs to start with PROMOTE Aviation. Making aviation as safe as possible can be accomplished by pricing it out of existence. And that is what the FAA has been exceedingly good at so far.
Mr. Brown,
You couldn’t be more wrong.
First, what FAA ATS does ISN’T even “AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL” per se. Only PILOTS and operators actually CONTROL aircraft. Whereas, FAA’s ANSP function provides SEPARATION SERVICE and certain facilities (e.g., Navaids), for operations in agreed airspace, under user and operator agreed rules and policies, by ATS “Air traffic separation specialists”. The only thing that those specialists in ATS (sic – “Controllers”) actually really control, is their own chair, display, and mike button (e.g., read FAR 91, where the pilot is always ultimately responsible for separation [e.g., FAR 91.113b], as well as ICAO Annex 6 and Annex 2, and PANS-RAC Doc 4444–RAC [to which the US a signatory]), which is the basis for FAA Order 7110.65.
Second, scores of countries globally already successfully and safely provide ATS via ANSPs that are NOT government run. Further, this has been safely and economically the case for decades (e.g., even look at the favorable comparative “Cost per unit separation service” for those providers). In fact even long ago, the US ATS services were once NOT governmental based.
Third, if the US elects to split out ATS, it isn’t planned to be either “private”, or “for profit”. Instead it is to be non-profit, so as to facilitate safe service while spurring timely and cost effective evolution, and provide a more direct link between those services needed, their evolution, and those who will need to fiscally provide for and supervise those services.
Fourth, while basic airspace use “right of way”, access, and CNS equipage rules, will likely always rightfully remain a governmental function, provision of safe separation services is NOT INHERENTLY governmental. Providing airspace users more direct oversight, and a more direct say in ATS evolution and operation is the only practical way to now fix a seriously inefficient, archaic, obsolete, vastly overly expensive “hand-carried 1:1 radar vector” based ATS. Hence at present, NextGen is heading straight for a $40B+ ineffective, outrageously expensive, disaster. Both Nextgen and FAA are now doing virtually nothing more than driving more nails into GAs eventual coffin, while impeding airspace access for GA and drones, and severely constraining needed DoD airspace access, while foisting massive inefficiency and unnecessary cost, delay, and schedule unreliability on US and global air transport.
So while this all could also “theoretically” be “fixed” without necessarily splitting out a separate ANSP from FAA, the likelihood of that desirable outcome, is near zero. Based on the last 30+ years of seriously adverse FAA and Congressional oversight evidence, and poor stewardship experience of FAA since the US last initiated the Upgraded 3rd Generation Air Traffic System in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the probability of successfully fixing all this now by Congressional action, within the bounds of existing FAA, approaches infinitesimal.
This is a very sad and mis-informed position for Sen. Cochran and his colleagues to be taking.
If their claimed “oversight” was at all useful or effective over the past 50+ years, then we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in in GA.
Airspace users from GA, to drones, to the airlines, and DoD alike, would share airspace effectively, economically, and not now all be facing crushing, obsolete, and inappropriate regulatory burdens, delays, and excessive costs. Aviation is suffering from a massively over-expensive, and failing NextGen plan BECAUSE of ineffective Congressional oversight. Their oversight has done virtually NOTHING to prevent FAA from using an entirely obsolete air-vehicle separation process, that costs likely an order of magnitude or more than what it could or should be costing airspace users and taxpayers. Just look at the example of the absurd 2020 ADS-B deadline, with FAA’s seriously over-specified, horrendously unnecessarily expensive, and still ineffective 91.227 based ADS-B equipment. Airlines are NOT going to meet that deadline. DoD is NOT going to meet that deadline. GA has no chance whatsoever to meet that deadline at the present equipage rate, and still excessive cost. Whereas if instead, NextGen were properly designed and administered from the outset by a user driven process and oversight, we wouldn’t be in nearly as bad shape. As designed, NextGen will NEVER work as advertised, for any users. NextGen is headed squarely for a $40B failure. Congressional oversight has not helped one iota.
Even in other areas, such as FAA’s touted and long delayed “Faux” 3rd Class medical reform (with critical compliance details STILL NOT RELEASED), FAA’s actions aren’t really going to provide substantive airmen medical reform at all.
In essence, FAA has escaped any useful Congressional helpful intervention or helpful FAA oversight for over 50 years now. So no thank you Sen. Cochran, et. al. Instead it is now time to cut the strings from a massively political FAA and Congressional driven budget and process, and split out ATS as a separate ANSP, and then completely start over with reorganizing FAA, filling it with people who actually understand aviation, just as once was done in back in both 1926 and 1938. But now with direct oversight from the airspace user community, who will be more directly recognized as paying the bills.
Why not just take ATC from the FAA and put them into the DOT directly? Their funding could be provided partly from the fuel taxes already collected from all non-Gov’t aviation users. And then give the FAA what is left over, since they have to handle airports and other infrastructure items?
In this way, ATC would not be hurting for funding, period. ATC would not be strangled by FAA bureaucracy, and would remain under control of the Fed Gov’t.
Then Congress could go through the FAA and clean house if it has a mind to (which it really should in my not so humble opinion).
But spinning them off to a new Corporation is not a very good idea from where I sit.
Sir Wylbur,
You make an important point.
However it doesn’t matter where the ANSP is placed after it is split out, or even if it is split out, …if the wrong NextGen design is used, the wrong policies and criteria are used, the wrong leadership is in place, and the proper substantive oversight by airspace USERS is not established.
Unfortunately the CNS (equipage and airspace use) rules for the “aircraft-ANSP interface” are all (by necessity) in the operating rules, which FAA still would own, no matter where ATS is eventually placed, and are inherently governmental (e.g., FAR 1, 91, 121, 129, 135, 43).
So equally critical is simultaneously FIXING a severely dysfunctional, bloated, and broken FAA. Anybody who has had to work with the also seriously broken US DOT (with a few notable exceptions), since the days of Alan Boyd, likely realizes that putting ATS in the US DOT is about the last place one would put it to be successful, unless it might be to merge ATS as a separate ANSP into Amtrak or Boston’s MTA, O:)
Yeah, I have a CDL and have had to deal with DOT from that perspective — owning a company with specialized commercial vehicles.
And I didn’t want to get into regs, but yeah, I can. And I have an idea of how to solve a Congress created problem that is going to get worse with drones taking over pipe-line patrols, etc. Unfortunately, Congress and this President would have to decide this is an answer and prosecute this this year.