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Trump Wants To Modernize Air Travel By Turning Over Control To the Big Airlines (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, President Donald Trump endorsed a plan to hand over oversight of the nation's airspace to a non-profit corporation that will likely be largely controlled by the major airlines. Republicans argue that privatizing air traffic control will help save money and fast track important technological upgrades. But Democrats and consumer groups criticize that plan as a corporate giveaway that will inevitably harm passengers. The air traffic reform proposal, which fell short in Congress last year, would transfer oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to a government-sanctioned, independent entity that would be made up of appointees from industry stakeholders. The effort picked up steam when the union representing air traffic controllers endorsed the plan, citing years of understaffing by the FAA. Some passengers may balk at the idea of handing over day-to-day management of the nation's highly complex air traffic control system to the same companies that rack up tens of thousands of customer complaints a year, and occasionally physically assault or drag passengers off their planes. But the Trump administration argues this is the only way to modernize a system that still runs on technology that's been around since World War II. The FAA is already years into a technology upgrade known as NextGen, which involves moving from the current system based on radar and voice communications to one based on satellite navigation and digital communications. The FAA wants to use GPS technology to shorten routes, save time and fuel, and reduce traffic delays by increasing capacity.
This is about rich people making even more money, not about anything else. I wish people would stop the nonsense about greater efficiency. It always ends up badly for regular people, just ask the people in Flint Michigan about their water.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Yes dear AC, like WMD in Iraq, no anthropomorphic climate change, voodoo economics, bombing middle eastern countries will make them peaceful, pollution is good for you, nuclear power is clean as hell and produces no waste products, privatization makes things cheaper, guns make everyone safer.... hell, I could go on all day.
Your post is so amusing. No wonder it is anonymous.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Oh, yeah. I really want my safety to be weighed against someone's profit margin in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Government is not a business. It should not be run like a business. People who think it should be should not be allowed anywhere near a decision making office in government.
The foxes don't care about any particular hens, only the fact that there are hens to eat. Smart businessfoxes would keep a large population of overfed, misinformed hens and kill off a percentage around the edges of hen society, maybe by taking away their health care, disability, and food stamps.
Man, you really need that seminar!
This is a bad idea that the airline lobby floats every few years. When the Democrats had control, they almost bought it until cooler heads prevailed. With Republicans in charge, it's time for another try. There really isn't much that the Federal government couldn't improve with privatization, but this is one of those things.
If this passes, the airlines will dominate the privatized company, transferring as much cost as they can to general aviation, while abusing their power for the purpose of limiting competition. They will dumb-down the controllers, resulting in chaos. It's hard to believe anyone could make the air travel industry any less accountable than it already is, but empowering an industry with a notoriously poor reputation of policing itself would be one way to do it.
Have we learned nothing from privatized airport security? Although I despise TSA, I have to admit that privatized airport security prior to 9/11 was absolutely useless. TSA, for all its well-documented flaws, ended the concept of minimum wage and constant turnover among security agents.
Canada did the exact same thing (privatize to an NGO) in 1996.
Nav Canada, the NGO that operates Canada's air traffic control, has won three IATA Eagle Awards for Best Air Traffic Controller since 2001. It also closely coordinates with the existing FAA ATC system as the Canadian and US airspace are extremely interrelated (perhaps the most so in the world).
Canada is one of about 50 countries that have gone this route (Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand are among the countries that have done so). Nav Canada even sells their system (Australia runs on it) - we could potentially just buy a solution.
Money coming from tax payers means that everyone, from poor to rich pay for the services. As opposed to people who can afford to use the airlines paying an additional fee to support the services they actually use. Considering the ultra wealthy can afford to pay a lesser rate for their taxes (the 80,000 page US tax code isn't that large to make it fair) it's the rest of the population paying for this today!
This is the problem with a whole lot of projects and schemes where both the far left and far right claim that we need Government to be our savior. Government tends to be horrible at everything, and maintaining and growing their tax funded budget is prioritized over everything else.
I'll really have to consider this more deeply over the next few days, but I'm fine with it as is. The FAA seems to be maintaining oversight of standards, investigations into incidents, etc.. and if that's the case I will remain fine with it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yes, because large corporations just LOVE losing $2.5 million dollars every time a plane crashes.
That's exactly right, corporations do not like losing money. So, it will be a cold calculation of how many dollars it saves not to have a crash and how many dollars it saves not to properly operate ATC. Maybe market forces mean we end up having better service with less loss of life, maybe it means something else. If the optimal profit result ends up being letting a few hundred more people die each year, guess thats what'll happen. Can't wait to find out...
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
That's exactly right, corporations do not like losing money. So, it will be a cold calculation of how many dollars it saves not to have a crash
Corporations don't "like" anything ... they're not people. (This isn't Mitt Romney posting, is it?)
The ones making the decisions of how much to spend on security have their own self-interest at heart. So ...
1. CEO cuts spending on safety
2. Short term profit rises
3. Stock skyrockets
4. CEO is hailed as turn around specialist
5. CEO retires, pocketing millions
6. Because of deferred maintenance (see #1), planes have more accidents
7. CEO, basking in retirement, sees start of televised report about plane crashes. Lifts remote. Changes channel.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
The problem is that FAA is not only an infrastructure operator, it is also a regulator. Hence what we see here is government-pushed Regulatory capture
This reform is long overdue. Al Gore had a similar proposal some 20 years ago, and Canada privatized longer than that. The idiots who rattle on about the evils of big corporations are probably still sore that Carter deregulated the industry >30 years ago, and since then air traffic has exploded and just about everyone can afford to fly. No doubt all those poor people were forced to do so by evil corporations.
I suspect it's more like nibbling a tiny Cheeto.
No, but they love short-term profits.
You can easily see how this works when you look at businesses that were sustained by government or government-owned companies for the longest time and then privatized. Governments are concerned with running services because that's the business they're in. Private corporations are concerned with making money, running the service is only the necessary evil, the means to the end.
So what they do is cut maintenance and reinvestment to the bare minimum to allow the service to continue. That means that the first couple years you don't notice much, but you eventually notice that the sustainability of the service has been axed when it shows that new people don't receive the training that their old counterpart got (because, why bother, the older ones who received the training can pick up their slack... at least until they retire), it shows that repairs and replacements didn't get the attention they needed and so on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.