CNN posts misleading story about air traffic planted by FAA / Whitehouse

Let's start with full disclosure: I am a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), a licensed pilot, an aerospace engineer, and, a Democratic Party committeeman in Orange County Florida.

Last week I noticed the following CNN story:

FAA: Crowded skies to get more crowded

Airline passengers can expect more delays as airplanes crowd the skies, the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday.

The agency expects an average of 1.4 million more takeoffs and landings -- the equivalent of traffic at two Dallas-Fort Worth International Airports -- every year until 2020. In 2006, air traffic controllers handled 61.1 million takeoffs and landings.

"Delays are mounting due to congested airspace and congested airports," said FAA administrator Marion Blakey. "The congestion is really becoming a chronic thing."

(...snip...)

Blakey said the nation's aging air traffic control system must be replaced to avoid gridlock in the skies.

To pay for a new system that would rely on satellite-based navigation, the FAA proposes to replace the ticket tax now paid by airline passengers with a combination of fees and taxes. That would force people who fly corporate jets to bear more of the cost of the air traffic control system.

Which is apparently based on this FAA press release:

This conveniently timed press release is a thinly-veiled political tactic designed to push back against the Congressional Aviation Subcommittee which is nixing, on a bipartisan basis, the proposed Bush 70 cent/gallon fuel tax hike and user fees. The Bush Administration is trying to create a false sense of emergency among the general public about changing the Air Traffic Control. (ATC)

The real purpose of these aviation tax increases is to make up for lost tax revenues from Bush tax cuts for the uberwealthy and to make up for vastly increased spending on the war in Iraq all of which have added tremendously to our national debt.

Because the aviation community is relatively small when compared to other groups upon which the government might raise taxes, it is my belief they thought could slide these taxes in on us "under the radar" so to speak because they felt that no one would notice or complain in a highly public way.

Here are the facts:

1) General Aviation (GA) stays out of Class B airspace (all cited airports in the article were Class B) if at all possible because of the hassle involved - particularly in NY and Washington due to all the restricted air space post 9/11. For that matter, we also generally try to avoid operating from Class C airports for similar reasons. It's much easier to fly from smaller Class D and uncontrolled fields and it's usually much closer to our final destinations anyways.

2) In the struggle between safety and user fees, safety always loses. User fees create a serious financial disincentive to file flight plans, get weather reports, use flight following, use the Instrument Flight Rules system and other ATC resources to insure safe operations.

3) Right now our GA operations are extremely safe due to conscientious, careful, and well trained pilots. If we switch to user fees and/or privatize the system, safety will fall by the wayside. No one will notice that safety has lapsed for a while until a spectacular accident occurs that would have been utterly unheard of and preventable under the existing SAFETY focused ATC system.

4) Such a dramatic increase in tax burden will literally kill the GA industry costing tens of thousands of jobs around the country and will inevitably result in some pilots engaging in technically legal yet still unsafe behaviors such as not filing flight plans in order to minimize the increased costs on themselves.

The money raised by increasing taxes on GA pilots will be more than offset by the detrimental effect on the economy, the increased cost of accident investigations and the money lost to increased death, injury, and property damage. It is better and cheaper to preemptively invest our tax dollars in insuring safety of operations rather than pay to clean up the extra accidents afterwards.

Read counterpoint here.

Tags: Airport saftey - FAA - Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association - Air Traffic Control - User Fees