“Don’t Privatize Air Traffic Control” is a New York Times editorial from February 15, 2016. The Times argues that the FAA is actually efficient but has been starved for funds: “Congress itself is to blame for some of NextGen’s problems because it has not provided stable funding to the F.A.A. in recent years.” The Times‘s portrait of the FAA as a model of efficiency is hard to square with experience, but a system run by a government crony could surely be far worse (see Amtrak, for example). And in fact the stuff that the FAA currently farms out to contractors seems to be frozen in time (see my NBAA report for how multi-billion-dollar ADS-B weather can’t catch up to 15-year-old XM weather).
Americans are so bad at running bureaucracies that it seems almost certain that any new system for collecting fees will have administrative costs vastly higher than the current system, which at least we know how to run (taxes on airline tickets; taxes on fuel purchased by private aircraft operators).
If Congress wants to change something, I would suggest privatizing aircraft certification so that multiple competing organizations could verify manufacturers’ compliance with regulations. This works well for consumer products. See UL and TUV Rheinland. This can boost the GDP by allowing U.S. aircraft manufacturers to get new and upgraded products to market faster.
If Congress truly can’t resist monkeying with air traffic control, the idea of giving it all to one big unaccountable bureaucracy is the height of madness. The U.S. is already split up into about 20 “centers” (list). Why not split things up so that running the radar in each center (and airports within those centers’ airspace) is contracted out every five years? Separation services (the people on the radio talking to pilots, issuing routes, etc.) would also be contracted out to the lowest qualified bidder every five years within each center. (One issue with privatization is that currently the federal government engages in age-based employment discrimination that would be illegal for a private employer. A controller cannot be hired if over age 30 and must generally retire at age 56.)
I think that we have ample evidence that when there is competition Americans can run things reasonably cost-effectively. If the government takes something over we’ll pay 2-4X the competitive market price (see healthcare, for example!). If the government gives a single private company the exclusive right to do something, there is no limit on how badly taxpayers and consumers can be abused.
Related:
- The CATO Institute buys into this idea, mostly due to the fact that the Canadian monopoly hasn’t ripped off citizens up there
“Potential train wreck” seems like an inapt metaphor, plane wrecks are worse than train wrecks. I don’t care about the cost being too high nearly as much as I care about the safety consequences. Do you think the correlation between cost and safety for the air traffic control system is positive, negative, or zero?
I’m PPL holder that flies out of CYOW and the airports nearby. I think NavCanada does a fine job. I rent from a club at CYOW so I don’t directly pay the NavCanada fees. The fees are baked into the rental rates. The club, as a tenant of the airport, has an arrangement for reduced fees. The club doesn’t consider the NavCanada fees too onerous. (Airport fees and complying with Transport Canada’s myriad rules are a different story.)
I’ve been into the NavCanada-managed control tower at CYOW several times and seen the controllers at work and the systems they use. They’re real professionals. The fact that some controllers volunteer to offer lectures and tower tours to area pilots is impressive. They don’t need to do that. I believe approx. 50% of the controllers at YOW are also licensed pilots.
NavCanada has developed software to run their flight scheduling. They also license that software to other countries’ ATC agencies. I was told that American terminal controllers, and possibly also tower controllers, still use paper strips for flight planning. If that’s the case I’d like to see NY TRACON in action!
NavCanada is a non-profit. I don’t know if the non-profit status has helped keep fees down or if we just got lucky and the NavCanada bureaucrats are efficient enough to keep fees reasonable. I guess whether the fees are reasonable or not is a matter of opinion. Charter operators and airlines may not agree with me.
Airport fees and taxes on aviation fuel are the largest “fees” we pay as GA flyers in Canada. NavCan fees are much less of a factor.
If the FAA privatizes ATC it sounds like the operator would be a non-profit. Will that keep fees low or will it have no effect? I’m not sure of the differences between Canadian and American non-profits but I’m sure they are different.
Joe: I don’t think there is any correlation between spending and safety. Spain was paying some of its controllers over $1 million per year each. Many of them worked at airports that in the U.S. wouldn’t have a controller at all (due to the lack of traffic). Despite having the highest paid controllers in the world, Spain didn’t have an especially great ATC system.
Matt: American non-profit orgs can and do pay employees over $1 million/year. Poke around among the Form 990s at guidestar.org and you can find them pretty quickly. With the FAA being part of the government there is a limit to what employees can be paid. Barack Obama is paid $400,000 per year to be President. It would be hard for a tower controller at an airport with five operations per hour to argue that he or she should be paid more than the President. Once these folks aren’t federal government workers, however, the $400k/year practical limit is removed.
People in Canada seem to have a little more restraint. Profits from a one-night sexual encounter with a drunken dermatologist are lower in Canada than in Massachusetts, for example (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Canada ). Yet Canadians get outraged when they hear about a fellow citizen making bank off child(ren). (The cash still flows, of course, but there is more public debate about why having sex pays better than going to college and working.)
Now that there are remote towers (see http://saab.com/th/region/saab-australia/security/remote-tower/ ) it would be possible to cut costs dramatically by having most controllers work out of a rural Midwestern location.
We have non-profits paying executives over $1mm/yr here too. Ontario’s air ambulance operator (Ornge) is one recent example. It was a scandal. I guess in the US that wouldn’t qualify as a scandal.
Not sure how the divorce stuff is relevant but I have a friend who is a dermatologist and I’ll tell him he should consider himself lucky he’s not in MA. 🙂