“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.]
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