Privatized ATC

Will 2018 Better Focus Our Aviation Future?

January 1, 2018 by Scott Spangler

Happy New Year! I hope you all shared a safe and joyous celebration with family and friends. And warm. Let’s not forget warm. The air temp was double digits below zero here in Wisconsin, and the wind chill was about three times that. Avoiding hypothermia was, however, a good distraction from thinking about the inexorable march of time and our aviation future.

A pragmatic realist, I know that for aviation, it could go either way. Whether it focuses on the positive or negative side of the line depends, in part, on your point of view of the past, present, and future. There is no better example of this than automation technology’s steady march into the cockpit. Aurora successfully demonstrated its autonomous UH-1H for the U.S. Marines at Quantico.

Passenger-carrying aircraft—airliners—are in technology’s sights, and it will, perhaps, forever solve the cyclic pilot shortages that plague commercial aviation. Again, whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view and aviation situation. General aviation’s future is more precarious. The outcome of several factors in 2018 will provide better focus on its future.

If the politicians give control of air traffic control to the airlines by privatizing the system, general aviation, as we’ve known it, it is a goner. This outcome will depend on how many people pull their heads out of vapid partisan ideological echo chambers and rise up as a concerted whole and firmly, but civilly, push the Star Trek mantra that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

This mantra could also be a greater salvation, because decades of income inequality affects more than those who can’t afford the dream of flight. In that regard, maybe giving ATC to the airlines would be a kinder end to general aviation, a coup de grace, as it were. Starvation, an insufficient number of new pilots and aircraft owners to sustain general aviation, is a more painful end.

How many aircraft owners decide this year to comply with the ADS-B mandate should bring this aspect of aviation’s future into better focus. The requirement for ADS-B capabilities takes effect two years from today. While the numbers vary, those who count them agree that the number of aircraft owners who installed the equipment is well off the pace that indicates full compliance.

This could mean that general aviation aircraft owners are either frugal procrastinators waiting for the best ADS-B deal or frugal Baby Boomers who will enjoy the freedom of flight until December 31, 2019, and then retire from the sky and sell their winged prides and joy. Two numbers will chart this course; those upgrading to ADS-B (and the volume of owners griping about the avionic shop lead time as they vie for precious openings) and the prices they ask when putting their aircraft up for sale (and the volume of their griping about the price relationship between supply and demand).

As it has since the Wrights launched the industry more than a century ago, only time will tell what course aviation’s future will take. But regardless of the outcome of its many challenges it has faced over its lifetime, and regardless of how the solutions to those challenges affected those involved, aviation continued in one form or another. And it will continue because it continues to covet fundamental contribution to humanity. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Quiet Skies: A General Aviation Transect of Canada

July 20, 2017 by Scott Spangler

On the eve of the Congressional vote to privatize the US air traffic control system, I made an informal, unscientific general aviation study of a nation—Canada—that privatized its system in 1996, when Transport Canada sold its air traffic control and navigation services to a private, nonprofit company, NavCanada. Without getting into the vociferous politics involved, the common denominator for a privatized service formerly provided by the government is user fees.

To gauge the consequences to general aviation, during a 3,057-mile transit of the TransCanada Highway, which began on Canada Day (July 1) at the Abbotsford, BC, border, and concluded at the Ogdensburg, NY, border on July 11, I would keep a sharp-eye pealed for GA airplanes flying within my constantly moving visual hemisphere. And I would explore GA airports that were not too far off the highway and talk to any aviator I happened to meet at them.

I started my survey without expectations. By landmass, Canada is the world’s second largest nation. NavCanada’s website says it manages 12 million aircraft operations annually for 40,000 customers in the 18 million square kilometers (6,949,838.85 square miles) that stretches north from the US-Canadian border to the North Pole and from Pacific West Coast to the North Atlantic, the world’s busiest oceanic airspace, which averages 1,200 flights a day to Europe.

On my Canadian transect, I saw nine aircraft. Four of them were turboprop ag aircraft at work in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. On Canada Day, walking back from dinner at Hope, British Columbia, I saw a single-engine prop plane with a long, thin high wing, whose make and model I could not identify. The pilot I saw enjoying a beautiful evening over Blind River, Ontario, was flying a Cessna 172. At the Dryden Regional Airport, an A-Star 350 hovered and landed at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources base, and on the other side of the airport, a Metroliner arrived to exchange its passengers. And on my survey’s last day, what looked like a Cessna Mustang business jet was on its final approach to Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

Privatized ATC May Solve Pilot Shortage

May 8, 2017 by Scott Spangler

This headline isn’t as strange as it sounds when you consider that the airlines are the leading promoters and supporters of privatizing air traffic control, and that the managers have often been at odds with the laborers (like pilots). Mix this with the travails of another “government corporation,” the U.S. Postal Service, and the growing capabilities of the Next Generation Air Transportation Systems digital data communications systems, and you have the makings for some dystopian devil’s advocacy.

Behind all of this is the acceptance that business leaders, regardless of the industry involved, are guided by one thing—the bottom line. Depending on their morals, they’ll do anything to increase that number. And one way to increase that number is to reduce or eliminate things that subtract from it. Take, for example, the “ticket tax” they pay, which supports the air traffic control system.

That tax is based on the base fare passengers pay for that ticket. It does not take into account all of the fees passengers pay for things that used to be wrapped up in the ticket price, things like baggage. Those fees go directly to the airlines’ bottom line. Privatizing ATC is the next step in this process. It will replace the ticket tax with ATC user fees, and we all know who pays an airline’s fees, don’t we?

Deciding Aviation Into an Uncertain Future

January 4, 2017 by Scott Spangler

Happy New Year!

As it has been for millennia, the year ahead is a blank diary in which we will write history with our daily decisions. What direction this uncertain future will take depends on how we make those decisions, especially those with zero-sum consequences, where one side gains at the expense of another. Ultimately, the decisions we make, support, and share will determine the future of aviation and the world in which is it exists.

Making decisions based on our gut, decisions that serve only our personal interests and ideology, rather than a logical assessment of the “facts” involved in the issue will have critical consequences. This is especially true for aviation, which is struggling to find its footing in the 21 century. Based on past ideas, such as the attempt to privatize air traffic control, 2017 will surely be a defining waypoint in aviation history.

To different degrees, everyone involved in civil, commercial, and military aviation communities make decisions that will shape their individual and collective futures. From the cockpit to the control tower, those answers decide the winner, short-term benefits to a few or long-term benefits to the industry as a whole.

As it does at an operational level, making informed decisions will span the gap of uncertainty, but making them requires research and effort, as well as an understanding that information and knowledge are not the same thing. Information is data. Knowledge is the accumulation of information and how it all relates to the question at hand. Only then can we acquire the wisdom needed to make a decision.

In this effort we must be pragmatic, concerned with actual practice, not theory, conspiracy, or speculation. And we must be skeptical, which is to say we must not be easily persuaded or convinced. We must doubt every source of information and ask questions when data from different sources does not add up. Regardless the source, question its authority.

Finally, we must be cynical. In any zero-sum situation, where someone gains because the opposing side loses, the cynic knows that the people involved are motivated only by their selfishness. Naturally, in the post-truth world, this reality is buried in echo-chamber propaganda.

For example, if ATC goes private, and is funded with user fees, who will ultimately pay those fees? And what happens to the airline ticket and GA fuel tax system that’s been funding America’s aviation infrastructure for decades?

Be aware of each decision made in 2017, because it will tacitly reveal our true motivations and hopes for tomorrow. — Scott Spangler, Editor

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.