“First he trashed Iraq and I didn’t complain because I wasn’t an Iraqi…”
The Bush Administration has turned its attention to the Federal Aviation Administration and changing the funding mechanisms to involve “user fees” collected from individual pilots in individual airplanes.
Currently the FAA is funded with taxes on a relatively small handful of vendors, each of whom pays a substantial amount. The airlines are the main reason that Air Traffic Control exists and they impose the biggest burden on the system since they like to bunch themselves up in a handful of cities and a handful of airports. The airlines, of which there aren’t very many, pay the lion’s share through a tax on tickets. Another big source of revenue is a tax on fuel sold to privately operated airplanes. This is collected from the handful of companies that sell aviation fuel (I think at the wholesale level). Finally, some money comes from general tax revenues.
The airlines complain that they pay too much and private planes should pay more. The FAA says “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could set our own prices instead of asking Congress for money from the general fund?”
The idea is that when John Old Geezer gets into his 30-year-old Cessna to practice instrument approaches, he should pay $50 per approach for his use of the assistance of air traffic control and maybe $20 for each touch-and-go landing. The FAA will keep track of tail numbers and send airplane owners bills for the use of their facilities. If a flight school gets a bill, it will go back through its rental records for the last month or two and figure out which student or renter was responsible for which charges and try to get the money from them.
What could be wrong with this system, which is already in place to some extent in Australia, Canada, and Europe? It assumes that the costs of collection are low and that the costs to flight schools of sorting out whose charges are whose are minimal. It assumes that people don’t have alternative forms of transportation and recreation.
Private pilots are an aging crowd, shrinking every year as they get too old and infirm to pass FAA medical standards. As prices for fuel, hangar, and maintenance continue to climb, many pilots decide to give up their hobby or switch to using an automobile for transportation. User fees in Australia caused so many to switch to ultralight aircraft or give up flying that the amounts collected were far less than predicted. If you went out to a local airport and looked at the tired old planes on the ramp and the tired old guys flying them, you would not say to yourself “Wow, here are a bunch of folks that we could really tax.”
The deeper problem is that when you expand the number of people who are paying taxes and fees from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand, the administrative costs skyrocket. When I take a short trip to Canada, I find that my mailbox fills up 2-3 months later with paper invoices from a dozen different authorities and airports. The fees requested, via hardcopy mail sent internationally, range from $5-75. They are supposed to be paid in Canadian dollars. If I ignore an invoice, someone back in Canada will send me a reminder. In most cases, I would estimate that their costs of invoicing and collection exceed the amount of the bill.
The FAA could adjust for higher-than-expected costs of collection by adding $100 to every fee to pay their costs of generating paper invoices and processing checks. Then they would find, however, that the higher fees had reduced demand, thus cutting down the total amount collected, and necessitating a further increase in the fees…
In theory, the FAA could become more efficient about collecting fees, but this is the organization that estimated it would cost $100 million to add photos to pilot certificates, the organization that indulged in the most expensive civilian software development project (roughly $10 billion) in history and then scrapped it after 15 years of futile efforts, and the organization that takes weeks or months to answer simple questions.
I thought about this a bit as the British Airways 747 touched down in London from Cape Town the other day. Pilots in Europe don’t tend to practice takeoffs and landings much because it is so costly and consequently the low-time guys at regional airlines tend to lack the feeling for the runway that enables a soft touchdown. How did the British Airways pilot do? It was a beautiful VFR morning with light winds and high clouds. The plane came down harder than I can remember any U.S. airline landing at Logan Airport, even in 35-knot wind gusts.
[If you are a pilot and want to tilt at the windmills, call up your senators and representative and ask them to limit the FAA to collecting money at only a handful of points in the system, so that the costs of administration don’t end up being more than 50 percent of the revenue. If they want more money from people who fly little airplanes, let them raise the fuel tax, not fill our mailboxes with paper invoices. We can’t stop the government from making us poor, but maybe we can stop it from making us miserable.]
The editor-in-chief of Flying magazine wrote an editorial in the May 2007 Flying titled “The Issue Is Larger Than User Fees” . All of what you say is true, but you don’t mention one of the motivators mentioned by McClellan. The Bush administration wants hand our public airways to the airlines at our expense. Its like giving the national highway system to the 18 wheelers and letting the trucking operators charge the rest of us to use the highways our tax dollars paid for. The Bush administration wants to steal things from the public and hand them to cronies. The impacts would be devastating; to small towns and cities all over the country when they can no longer get air-ambulance; when accidents start happening because users avoid safety related services or towered airports to save enough money to try to stay in the air; and as Philip points out, when there are no decent homegrown pilots.
Philip,
You wrote:
What project are you referring to?
Asking for sympathy on user fees based on the cohort of pilots, however justified, will always be ineffective because there will always be an anecdotal group of rich pilots out there that will produce no sympathy.
While it’s implied by your argument, I think saying directly that the system should be paid for with fuel taxes, much like road taxes are included in automotive fuel prices, is a much stronger and more relatable argument for non-pilot voters.
James: That is precisely my point, so I probably should have said it directly. We can’t avoid the government taxing us, but we can ask that it be done in a way that doesn’t fill up our mailbox with 30 paper invoices every month. If they want more money from the private airplane crowd, let them raise the fuel tax. Make us poor, not miserable….
For safety’s sake, it’s completely insane to discourage pilots from using VFR and IFR flight plans, flight following, and instrument approaches.
But enough of the Bush-bashing. The airlines and the FAA were trying to impose user fees long before the Bush Administration arrived. The FAA wants less oversight, and the airlines want to punish small aircraft for the system they created. Congressmen from both sides have shielded us from user fees so far. Let’s hope they keep it up.
http://www.aopa.org/members/files/pilot/1995/pp9511.html
(among many articles)
In the UK the regulatory authority (the CAA) has to make a profit. As such, it charges a lot for all kinds of things. Additionally, as noted, European airfields charge approach fees, high landing fees, some mandate expensive handling (even for the guy in his 152). As a result private pilots avoid flying to certain better equipped airfields, they fly VFR rather than IFR to avoid en-route charges (only payable for aircraft over 2,000kg); all of these constitute a prima facie case for a lowering of safety. Whether or not it really causes accidents I suppose we can’t know. Likewise, an instrument rating his so difficult to obtain that very very few pilots ever do; the general consensus is that that raises more safety issues than does the high user charges.
General Aviation in the US is seen as a nirvana by many Europeans; even to the extent that many pilots (myself included) operate N-registered aircraft so that much of what they do is governed not by their local regulators but by the FAA.
Meanwhile, given that aviation charges are so damned high in Europe (avgas at $10 a gallon, etc.) you’ll find European pilots moaning about the airlines, particularly the plethora of low cost carriers, grabbing more and more airspace, mandating Mode S transponders and so on.
The end result of all this is that general aviation is used much less than it could be; so perhaps you’re heading down that route.
I think there are a few non-US pro pilots who might have something to say about the notion that they can’t land properly. Try posting that suggestion on PPRuNe and see what sort of responses it garners. Then again, if the US didn’t have such protectionist airspace policies for foreign carriers all the European carriers could be flying around the US learning how to land properly…
User fees are an awful. The law that authorizes the FAA states that it’s goal is to ensure aviation safety. Now the FAA is proposing taxes that will discourage the use of safety services by all pilots. This is in direct opposition to the charter of the FAA.
Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and John Sununu (R-NH) tried to kill the user fees, but they were defeated by a 12-11 vote in the Commerce Committee. John Kerry voted in favor of user fees. We can’t accuse him of voting in self-interest since he is a guy who has himself flown around via private jet even for Washington/Boston trips when commercial airliners go every 30 minutes.
Here in New Zealand we have user fees for everything. Flight plans, airways and landing charges at every airfield, even the 2000ft grass strip down the road from here has a landing charge. We also have a local outfit that brings pilots out from the UK, trains them up and sends them back straight to Easyjet and similar. Apparently it’s still cheaper here than Europe
Philip:
Good news: The bill proposing fees was defeated in H.R.2881
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2007/070628house.html
Instead, avgas taxes are going to go from 19.3 cents/gallon to 24.1 cents/gallon