Bloomberg Businessweek has a nice article this morning on US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s plan to close 168 air traffic control towers next month to cope with the budget cuts of the sequestration. Before panic sets in, do note that there are plenty of small airfields in the US without towers. At these locations, pilots talk to each other, rather like ship captains, announcing their intentions to take off and land. That works where traffic is very light; where it’s heavy, well, there’s a reason for those towers.
Ray says that he doesn’t have the money to keep the service running at today’s standards, and perhaps he’s right, and not just crying wolf (like at least a few folks in the Pentagon). But this problem should definitely be seen a case of the sequestration laying bare the inefficiency of a government agency coordinating a commercial service and funding it with tax revenues.
Consider that in Canada, air traffic control is similarly the responsibility of the federal government, but the authority to manage it has been devolved to Nav Canada, a non-share, private corporation. Nav Canada collects not taxes, but user fees from airlines to recover the costs of controlling that traffic. At its webpage for investor relations (the company has bondholders, if not shareholders), the company explains that
In accordance with the Civil Air Navigation Services Commercialization Act, NAV CANADA must not set its charges at a level that would be in excess of what is required to meet the cost of providing civil air navigation services.
Indeed, as its financial statements indicate, it’s actually slightly in the black, and thus actually making money. Making money means not relying on tax revenues and appropriations from the Congress, which can’t seem to appropriate anything right now.
Commercial terms of service in theory also mean charging efficiently for the cost of that service. That doesn’t work with every regulated service, of course: telephony, postal, and electrical services around the world show a long history of cross-subsidy from wealthier to less wealthy customers. In the US air traffic control scheme, private pilots don’t pay the same costs as airlines for their landings and take-offs. Very few would have the financial resources to do so at large airports, but that’s just an indication that there’s a far excess of economically inefficient air travel in the United States. It’s bizarrely larger than anywhere else on Earth. And before you get worked up about all those joy-riding sport pilots, who can’t digest even the proposal to charge them $100 per instrumented flight plan, think about who is paying for them. Ordinary taxpayers. And that’s just wrong.
Similar to the arrangement in Canada is that in Britain, under National Air Traffic Services (NATS) Ltd.. That’s to be expected in the UK, where privatization, commercialization, and quasi-governmental bodies have been well the norm—with the odd exception of the National Health Service—since the Thatcher revolution, starting almost thirty years ago.
In the United States, changing this would require a literal Act of Congress, and as the Madisonian system shows from time to time, the US Congress has a core competence in doing nothing. But if the towers really do close in a month, we may have an opportunity, as people start screaming, and legislators find an opportunity to move one more thing off their books. It’s clearly an idea that needs to come to the United States; folks from Ron Paul to Peter Orszag have endorsed it (I particularly recommend Orszag’s editorial on the subject). So let’s get on with it.
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