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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.
Two things that come to mind when I think about Republcans:
1. Embrace of technological progress.
2. Telling the truth about what motivates their policies.
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.
The plan is to create an NGO to operate it, fully funded by user fees -- not to hand control over to the airlines.
This system is used in about 50 countries, including Canada, the UK, and Australia.
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.
You mean like go back to the TWENTIETH CENTURY MODEL where airports or airlines ran the security lines?
We are *NOT* talking about the TSA, we are talking about the FAA. Different.
In *principle* this could work, but more likly, Trump will hand it off to some corporation that sends a lobbiest with a large bag of cash to suck his cock.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
GPS is fine when it works. What will happen to air travel when GPS goes down?
This could happen through a technical fault (likely locally, unlikely globally) or via enemy action (jamming locally, destruction of the infrastructure globally).
Remember that the C/A (coarse/acquisition) code that we civilians use for navigation was never meant for that. Like the Internet, various bits of old and new technology and capability gradually accreted into something upon which our entire economy depends. That something was not designed as a whole, and was certainly not designed for robustness and dependability. Ponder this the next time you step onto a plane.
Presumably there will be an up-charge for "premium traffic control".
Nullius in verba
And then you can have a supreme council, a council of the heads of councils if you will.
This was briefly the government of Italy, with ministers of Agriculture and Forestry, Corporations, Finance and so on. This was called the Grand Council of Fascism, which see.
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
The NextGen program has had several high-profile failures. The implementation of new routes in Phoenix resulted in a large number of complaints and lawsuits against the FAA. The more recent changes in the SF Bay Area including routing a much higher number of aircraft over Palo Alto and lower elevations in the Santa Cruz Mountains, both of which have angered a great many residents.
Jet traffic brings noise pollution and air pollution to the corridors they travel, resulting in health impacts (though difficult to measure) and sometimes significant reductions in property value. The previous corridors have been used for decades and the impact is well-understood by residents in those areas; the change was not well-communicated before being implemented and residents were mostly caught unawares.
The benefits of these changes include a higher volume of traffic to airports, increasing airport profits; more efficient routes for airlines, increasing airline profits; and potentially cheaper fares for customers resulting from the first two changes. Speaking personally, I would rather keep my home value and quieter skies.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
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.
Huh? Who cares?
If some academic out there actually came up with 31 genders that's really no concern of mine. Now pollution and climate change, that actually affects things. I can ignore people in ivory towers coming up with complicated classification schemes, but being ignoring unable to breathe is kind of hard.
Somebody is actually spending time feeling outraged about this 31 genders nonsense?
Although many don't see it, America leads in freedom of personal aviation. I can use my aircraft just as I use my car. I have proper FAA licenses and medical certificates. I am instrument rated and can fly with the same rules as the airlines. I can also get in my plane and go camping at a remote strip or visit a restaurant in the next town's airport without requesting permission from anyone just as I would with my car. If I fly into big central airports following the same rules as the airlines then I can and do coordinate with the proper FAA officials. My use of these facilities is fully funded by taxes levied on the aviation gasoline that I burn n the plane. The idea here is that as a free American I can choose my mode of transportation within the nation's transportation system on the same basis as anyone else, private or corporate. For the most part, my aircraft is like my car.
With a switch from costs coming from taxes on aviation gasoline to "user fees" for various specific operations and a switch from a government control system to a private NGO the freedom to use an aircraft much like a car for personal transportation will mostly disappear. This is exactly what has happened in (e.g.) Europe where(for example) fees for each takeoff and landing effectively stop practice at small airports.
Then a governing board that will inevitably be dominated by the airlines will set the rules so that those pesky private aircraft will be effectively gone.
If you like this idea, then please accept the same for our highways. Each time you drive to the store for some milk, every time you take a weekend at the lake, you must first file a "drive plan" with a corporate board run by the trucking industry. Then you will give a credit card number so that your driveway exit, road use, and parking use fees will be automatically paid for the trip.
And if you think that this is tin-foil-hat stuff, please look at the rules for private aircraft in Europe and the rest of the world.
This is the death of one more freedom that we currently have in this great country.
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!
Oh, goddammit. I finally decided to spend sometime to figure out what's all this nonsense about.
It's an ad: https://heatst.com/culture-war...
Somebody just made an ad to say "here we're accepting of everybody, regardless of what you call yourself", and then posted a list of 31 terms, some of which seem duplicates to me (eg, Male-To-Female and MTF both appear in the list, as well as several variations on "trans").
Basically, whoever made that list tried listing absolutely every possible term they could think of just to drive home that point. That's all there is to it. It's like doing the same thing for racism and then filling a page with Wikipedia's list of nationalities.
And this is what people decided to get all outraged about? Sheesh. People have too much free time these days.
I personally knew some GOP planners; this is how they plan:
1) Purposely fuck up government services as much as they possibly can without getting into trouble themselves: get people to hate stuff they like.
2) FUD against government services and politicians... Uncertantity and Doubt = lower voter turn out. Fear (often connected to Hate) is central to their campaigning.
3) Run on reform for said services counting on the public to not be smart enough to see wolves in sheeps' clothing.
4) After the public is upset enough, privatize services for huge profit. Continue FUD and coverups until it becomes the new normal. Then just maintain it as people forget the past (before they screwed it up) plus without oversight people don't know a fraction of what goes on compared to before.
Their plan for education was to make people hate public education which is highly popular. So it involves much more to ruin the system-- such as pitting groups against each other. I asked "won't that harm a generation of students?" and they replied "it's worth it, we can handle the loss of a few generations; besides the best kids will go to private schools and that should keep the USA #1." I'm not kidding. Their ideology is stronger than their religion.
https://magicmoneytree.net/
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
Pre-911, the airlines ran security for half the price, with much shorter delays, and with more courtesy and politeness. Penetration testing has shown that TSA is no better than their predecessors at catching perps.
Just look at the BA fiasco. Hotshot CEO cut IT spending. No backup system. Lousy IT design and operation. System crashed. (At least a plane didn't crash)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The problem is really the plan. Trump undoubtedly doesn't have one yet. If he ever gets around to it, it will be a horrible give away that threatens key pillars of ATC.
It's kind of like the Iraq war. Was getting rid of Saddam a bad idea? Not too bad. Does that mean we should let Dick Cheney do it? Hell no. The dudes a moron and also doesn't give a shit.
Play Command HQ online
I suspect it's more like nibbling a tiny Cheeto.
You made the claim "Government tends to be horrible at everything". Keep in mind that when states a premise as a fact, they are "Begging the question."
Government is not horrible at everything. In fact it is quite good at a lot of things. Our mail is delivered every day, our police and fire departments respond every day, our military defends US interests every day, our taxes are collected every day, our currency is managed every day, and thousands of other less-visible governmental actions are performed well every day.
Government is really bad at some things; but, often those things are the kinds of things that private enterprise is equally bad at, if not worse. Government eventually desegregated the private Universities, despite plenty of action to thwart it. In my opinion, Government didn't do a great job in that department, rather they blundered their way through it. However, they did get the job done. Likewise, the Nixon impeachment proceedings were another slow plodding blunder with an eventual success. The cost overruns of NASA were enormous, but the goal of landing a man on the moon was reached. At the time, no private entity would have been able to achieve these goals.
I applaud your decision to consider things more deeply. I hope your consider how much you have already bought into the "evil Government" story line. This story line has managed to leverage the election of a person unqualified to be a politician (he's qualified to be a CEO of Trump Enterprises, but these are not equivalent positions).
US history has had automotive manufacturers release cars they know would explode in minor collisions because it was cheaper to incur the expenses of about 2,400 wrongful deaths than to pay the $11 per car to put a weld patch over the gas tank. That is what a business will do, maximize profits selfishly. Perhaps there are a few businesses which won't, but that doesn't impede the ones that do.
Only government can protect the rights of the people. Stop bashing it if you want your rights protected. Fix it if you think it is broken, but TRUST me on this, don't take anyone's word as fact that it is broken. Lying about broken government is often a cheap trick to get in office.
To prove my point, our current President lied about the broken "Obama plays too much golf" when in reality he's played more golf in the first five months than Obama has played in eight years.
That's your tax dollars at work people! His Secret Service has to guard the golf course. He has to buy out the whole course to do so. He is still getting paid while playing. I'd be pissed if someone earned my trust by pointing out a problem, and then used my votes to make the problem worse (even if it was something as non life-threatening as golf).
There is an old Dutch saying "Truth in small things is not a small thing." It has may ways of being interpreted, but I'll go with, "If one will lie about a small thing, then lying is not a big deal for that person." Trump lies about how much time a President should spend golfing, if Obama played too much golf, then Trump is playing way too much golf (except that Trump is obviously fine with his frequency of playing golf). That's about as small as it gets. Don't expect any truth from this man.
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.
Umm, door locks were the fix that prevented any other 9/11s from occurring. The security theater hasn't done a thing.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
That and the hijackers exploited a "rule" about hijacking that was true until 9-11. Up until then, if your flight was hijacked, you sat still and did nothing. The plane was re-routed to somewhere like Cuba, the hijacker put on a big show to get attention to whatever it was he wanted attention on, and then everyone was released. So long as you kept quiet, you were inconvenienced but otherwise unharmed.
The people on the first two planes that were hijacked on 9-11 kept quiet assuming that this was the rule. The third plane got wind of what was going on and fought back. Sure, they didn't survive, but they went down fighting and ensuring that the hijackers didn't reach target #3.
Any future hijacker won't be able to rely on people abiding by pre-911 hijacking rules. Even if the hijacker is the "fly to Cuba" type, people will assume this is another 9-11 and will fight back. We've seen it in the "shoe bomber" and other hijack attempts. Passengers and crew fight back and subdue the hijacker. This exploit that the 9-11 hijackers used is closed for good.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yes... go on. Tell me what percentage of government projects are that far over budget, or never completed.
Then compare and contrast with the number of big budget *corporate* projects that go way over budget, or are never completed.
Datum: I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells, in the mid-nineties, in a start-up division. We were going to be Ameritech's entry in the long distance service sweepstakes. And after two years, and three quarters of a BILLION DOLLARS, they gave up and shut it down.
Let's see your data.