aviation user fees

User-Fee ATC: Speak Up Now or Lose Access

January 18, 2016 by Scott Spangler

Call it what you like, privatizing, corporatizing, or commercializing the FAA air traffic control system will ruin the foundation of the world’s largest, safest, and most diverse and complex national airspace system. Oh, and unless we stand up and speak up to our elected officials, it will probably mark the end of general aviation as we know it. And not for the reason you think.

Our politicians and the special interests behind them propose this ATC takeover at least once a decade. Common to all of them is replacing the efficient and equitable fuel-and-ticket-tax funding of the system with user fees. Money always gets a pilot’s attention, but that’s not what this is about.

What matters most to the special interests behind these efforts is control of who has access to the airspace and airports. Regardless of the primary target, such as the growing number of low-cost carriers targeted in the 1990’s user-fee ATC attempt, GA always comes second to the airlines’ needs, and in every scheme, airline people are the majority on the board of directors that would run user-fee ATC.

The GA community successfully opposed the user-fee ATC schemes proposed in the 1990s and in 2006-8, but the threat this year is more ominous for several reasons.

Fair Taxation Instead of Aviation User Fees

July 15, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Inadequate revenue from aviation taxes on fuel and tickets, which fund the U.S. aviation infrastructure and the agency that regulates it, is how some in the FAA justify their desire for user fees to make up the difference. Before they go there, why doesn’t government catch up with current airline business practices and include the myriad fees that are not subject to the ticket tax.

Looking at untaxed airline baggage fees.

We’re taking some serious money here, an average of $250 million a year from baggage fees alone, according to a Washington Post article, “As airlines raise fees instead of fares, taxpayers pick up the tab.” As the article’s graphic above shows, between 2007 and 2012 the airlines collected $12.8 billion in baggage fees. At the 7.5 percent ticket tax rate, that’s $960 million in lost revenue. During the same period, the airlines charged another $11 billion to change a ticket.

Simply put, airline fees not subject to the ticket tax is one reason why aviation revenue has not kept pace with its costs. Let’s face it, we’d all like tax-free income, but it is not fair to anyone who pays the fees and uses the system. The DoT took the first step in its fiduciary responsibilities when it required airlines to include all applicable fees when passengers bought a ticket. Making the total subject to the ticket tax seem the logical next step.

With Air Show ATC Fees, the FAA is Following the Airlines’ Lead

July 1, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Searching for a scintilla of logic behind the FAA’s ATC fees for the air traffic control services it provides at fly-ins, I realized that the roughly $500,000 bill it sent EAA AirVenture Oshkosh was, in effect, an airline baggage fee. From either source, forget all their trumpeted rationalizations. That nonsense drowned in the fetid swamp of cynicism government and big business long ago created as they redeveloped society so that it met their needs at the expense of their customers.

In other words, they did it because they could.

Government has been trying to recreate an airline business model of charging fees for everything, and sequestration gave them the “authorization” to do it. What’s really ironic is that airline fees, which are not taxed like tickets or fuel, contribute no revenue to the aviation infrastructure, airports, capital improvements, and FAA operations including ATC. Yup, airline fees are a parasite, and to make up for the financial nutrition it sucks from the system, FAA is starting with ATC fees.

According to the Washington Post, since they started the practice, the airlines have collected $12.8 billion in fees for something that was once free. In 2012 they collected $924 million—that’s right, nearly a billion dollars—in baggage fees, a 3 percent increase over the same period in 2011. Oh, and baggage fees are not taxed like airline tickets. With the aviation fuel tax, this ticket revenue pays for the American aviation infrastructure, at least until FAA fees on all the services it provides takes over.

User (as in you pay) Fees (as in you pay more)

July 24, 2011 by Robert Mark

The Friday before AirVenture is supposed to be a really exciting time with friends gathering from all around the world to come hang out for good times and a week of spouse-numbing airplane speak. We’re actually hosting the Plane Crazy Down Under guys at our home in Chicago and it’s been great to connect with people we’ve known only as voices from another hemisphere. Luckily David Vanderhoof from the Airplane Geeks arrived to keep the US contingent in balance. But a discussion we had just this morning over breakfast about how the crushing user fee structure has annihilated general aviation industry in Australia was eye-opening. The Airplane Geeks are planning an entire show soon to talk about it, because it’s THAT critical to keep flying as we know it.

This year, AirVenture has a massive stormcloud hovering nearby … just close enough to realize it’s there, but not yet upon us (and no, I’m not talking about those Wisconsin thunderstorms). The topic is user fees – yes, again – for all aspects of business and general aviation. When I wrote about this a few months back as an idea hiding in the wings, I actually was hoping I was wrong. I guess I wasn’t.

And this time, user fees are not simply an agenda being shoved at us by another piece of our own industry the way the airlines came at us a few years ago. This time it’s coming from the folks we sent to Washington to represent us. [Read more…] about User (as in you pay) Fees (as in you pay more)