The president’s proposal transfers responsibility for providing air traffic services from the FAA to a private, nonprofit organization. The process is expected to unfold over three years, taking 30,000 FAA employees — controllers and technicians included — off the federal payroll, “at no charge.”
Is this a good idea? Think safety may be compromised?
No. The Federal Aviation Administration is charged with representing the public interest with regard to airline safety and efficiency regardless of how much the airlines protest, and acts to advance the science and technology of aviation oversight. While plenty of complaints can be levied against the FAA for its bloated bureaucracy and difficulties implementing the NextGen air traffic control system, this is like treating a hangnail by cutting off the arm, and only feeds into the very corporate interests that Trump claimed he was going to remove from Washington influence. This isn’t like quasi-privatizing the Post Office or hiring contractors to perform non-critical federal jobs; this is giving up regulatory contol over a resource that should be held in common use and safety formthe public at large.
Stranger
Wouldn’t that be like privatizing the Fire Marshall’s Office, or 911 call center. I thought the highest priority, if not the sole purpose of the Air Traffic Control was public safety, and not as an additional avenue for corporate investors to generate portfolio growth.
How exactly is public safety improved, with oversight by a subsidiary of Viacom or Monsanto, whose corporate goal and policy objective is earnings?
What happens if foreign air carriers refuse to fly through US airspace, distrusting of a privatized FAA?
Canada’s air traffic control system was privatised in 1996 (see NAV Canada). The government (Transport Canada) still handles most of the regulatory side and other subjects such as R&D.
I don’t know if it’s been a good thing, but the system is still working. I don’t know how similar the process – and result – would be in the U.S.
911 has already been privatized in some jurisdictions. And consolidation of 911 means that dispatchers and call takers may be responsible for a far larger geographic area so that the advantage of local knowledge is reduced.
And many fire departments are outright volunteers. There is nothing unique about government eschewing responsibility in this area.
I don’ t know if ATC needs to be privatized, but it does need to have a reliable budget to allow for investment in upgrading this critical infrastructure. Perhaps cleaving it from government budgetary control might allow it to control its future long enough to upgrade to more modern means of control.
I’m not terribly knowledgeable on the FAA, but my gut reaction is to be afraid of weakening the regulatory power of the agency. I suppose if it wound up being something like NERC, that might be OK. I’m sure Stranger will set me straight, but my understanding is that NERC is a non-profit, quasi governmental agency that retains the ability to levy fines and such. If the privatized FAA can still act as an effective regulatory body, then I guess privatizing might not be awful, although I’m not sure I see the benefit in doing so. But if privatizing it is just deregulation with a few niceties of complexity (I know, I know, that’s crazy talk), then I’m going to fly even less than I do now.
Does this mean they can be sued when there are crashes they might have contributed to through negligence or otherwise?
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I was coming in to post this. We’ve had a not-part-of-government air traffic control system in Canada for 21 years, and it seems to be working.
I think there’s a bit of confusion in some of the responses in this thread.
For instance, “privatization” doesn’t necessarily mean “sold to the private market.” It can mean something like “taken out of the direct control of the executive branch and given to a non-profit corporation.” That’s how it worked in Canada: NavCan is a non-profit corporation, not under the direct control of the executive branch, but also not under market forces. That seems to be what Trump has in mind, based on the news article in the OP. The new corporation therefore could not be owned by Viacom or Monsanto, as jtur88 suggests. Nor have foreign airlines, including US airlines, had any problems or concerns about flying into Canadian airspace in the 21 years since air traffic was transferred to NAV Can.
Nor does transferring this function to a non-profit corporation mean that the Government loses regulatory control, as Stranger suggests. It depends on what’s in the statute that implements the change. For example, in the Canadian NAVCan Act, the federal Cabinet has the power to give directives to NAV Can to ensure services to remote and northern communities, compliance with Canada’s international air traffic control obligations, national security, and so on. And if NAV Can plans to reduces services, it needs the permission of the relevant federal minister. It just depends on what the statute says, and what degree of control the federal government wants to maintain.
Nor, according to the article, is this a privatization of all of FAA, as Bayard seems to suggest. Air traffic in the States is provided by the FAA. The proposal is to carve that service out of the FAA as a stand-alone, leaving the FAA with its regulatory powers, including the power to regulate the new air traffic body. Regulatory power does not depend on ownership or operation directly by the executive branch.
What’s the benefit? As mentioned in the article, it takes air traffic control out of direct political control, and out of the vagaries of the federal budget process. In Canada, NAV Can can raise money on the public bond markets (note: not equities, since it’s a non-profit), as well as by charging fees to airports and air travellers to fund the system. The idea is that giving it financial and operational autonomy, while still being subject to federal regulatory oversight, is a better way to provide the services.
Whether of not each of us agrees with that argument is of course a matter of political judgment, not one of fact. 
I would just note that the 1996 change in Canada was implemented by a Liberal government. The Government also privatized the ownership and management of airports at the same time, transferring them to local not-for-profit corporations. I’ve certainly noticed much better service from our local airport in the past 20 years, under local management rather than being part of the federal Department of Transport, managed from Ottawa.
The article is about privatising Air Traffic Control, not the FAA.
Stranger is correct, he’s talking about privatizing a portion of what FAA does. With a few exceptions, the FAA is in charge of air traffic control. It administers most towers, app/dep controls and enroute centers. Some airfields have private towers, and some segments of the enroute system rely on military bases, but these all follow the same set of FAA regs.
The Flight Service Stations* (FSS) were privatized some time ago. There were a few hiccups the first week, but overall I can’t tell any difference as a user.
The big change when the FSS was taken over by Lockheed was the end of federal pensions for the workers. I suspect that sort of cost savings might be behind the drive to privatize ATC. (Just guessing)
*Flight Service Stations handle flight plans and weather (mostly)
Would Ronald Regan have been able to fire all the air traffic controllers if they were privatized? Would he have needed to?
I don’t really have an opinion on the matter. Just that it really isn’t a choice between “bloated over-regulated inept government agency” and “corrupt, penny-pinching, corner cutting corporation”.
It’s just that all ideas that come from Trump sounds stupid because he has proven himself to be an arrogant, ill-informed narcissistic ass with a myopic view of the world through the lens of “deals”, “money” and “business” and an inflated estimation of his abilities to conduct these things in a context other than building golf courses and gaudy condo towers.
The answer to the question is “it depends”. This is a matter of “the devil is in the details”, writ large. Further to the posts by Heracles and Northern Piper about Nav Canada, this organization was carefully structured to ensure sound governance and eliminate potential conflicts of interest; for example, Wikipedia states that “[The structure of the board of directors] ensures that the interests of individual stakeholders do not predominate and no member group could exert undue influence over the remainder of the board. To further ensure that the interests of Nav Canada are served, these board members cannot be active employees or members of airlines, unions, or government.”
It’s not the privatization per se that is the critical question but who is doing it and how it will be done. So the question that needs to be asked is what is the likelihood of this restructuring serving the public interest as opposed to the interests of wealth-seeking plutocrats and anti-government anti-regulatory zealots. Given the short history of this administration so far, it’s not hard to guess the answer.
It seems the current system has a small problem where the FAA as a regulator are tasked with regulating themselves, the FAA as air traffic service provider. It could well end up safer if the FAA were regulating an entirely separate body. Privatization of ATC has been done in many countries in addition to Canada.
Well yes, but Stranger is still incorrect. ATC is indeed part of the FAA but it’s not the whole of the FAA. I suppose I’m splitting hairs here.
Best answer.
In general in the US, privatization has so far, meant much higher costs to customers, and no improvement in service. We have had privatized services such as electricity and water and sewers for as long as I’ve been around, and those have always been sore spots in local politics. As someone mentioned above, referring to some of the Canadian systems, the politicians STILL get to play games about them, either posturing for effect during rough times, or claiming to have saved taxpayers money (which they had nothing to do with) during better times.
I’ve come to be of the opinion, or perhaps suspicion is the better term, that all suggestions for privatization in the US, are thinly disguised tricks, to make it appear that government costs have fallen (and thereby justify tax cuts to the rich), even though all that’s really happened to the rest of us, is that our cost of living has gone up, but we can no longer point to federal taxes as our main bugaboo.
The worst thing about it, is that most “privatization” here is functionally a shift to fascism. Control and operation of essential services are handed over to GOVERNMENT PROTECTED MONOPOLIES, and additional monies are skimmed from their operation to overpay a small group of executives.
So is this a ruse to de-unionize the the air traffic controllers?
The Air traffic controllers union has endorsed the bill to privatize Air Traffic Control for the ostensible reason that it would allow their members to work with upgraded equipment.
No, and in fact being employees of a private company rather than public servants they would likely have a stronger position for colletive bargaining under existing labor law (at least until Trump and Congress get around to gutting that). It is more likely an effort to push the costs to the private sector in the hopes that a private company–which will turn around and hire contractors to perform much of the labor–will cut enough corners to reduce costs. Which is exactly what should not be done with a service critical to public safety.
Note that this isn’t just establishing a service that will take over air traffic control, but handing over hundreds of millions of dollars of ATC infrastructure to a private “non-profit” corporation (which despite the term, non-profits typically do make a profit by necessity) which will then be run by private interests. Want to hazard a guess at what those interests will be and who they funnel campaign funds to? This is exactly, and I do mean exactly, the kind of pillaging of publically-owned infrastructure and services that Russia went through in the mid-Ninties leading to the rise of oligarchs buying goverment assets and resources at a tiny fraction of the real value.
This is Trump “draining the swamp.” And of course Department of Transportation Secretary and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Elaine Chao will be just fine with this. This is the purloined letter of public corruption, out in front for all to see, championed by the same asshole who just blatantly lied about the strictures of the Paris Accords and the reasons for the United States arbitraril exiting them instead of just saying, “because the Koch Brothers want it.”
Stranger
Nope, Bill Shuster, R-PA, has been trying to do this for years, he really pushed last year. His father was trying to do the same back in the 80s.
This move would also affect more than just the controllers, there are some 30,000 people that would have to transfer jobs to whatever they come up with. This includes all of the Aeronav products, all of the people who create the instrument approaches and I believe the National Flight Data Digest.
From what I was told the last time this came up was that there would be a committee consisting of one FAA official, one union rep, and three outside people. The fear was that the airlines would basically come in and change the airspace to what they want it to look like, which means lower flights and shorter routes over more neighborhoods. There were a number of other things that were talked about too, but I don’t remember all of them.
I work for one of the affected departments, but I don’t pay too much attention since I can’t do anything about it.
But, the flights are going to be faster. Doesn’t everybody want that?