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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.
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!
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.
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!
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
"GPS" is used in the article simply because it's a nice buzzword that non-aviation people know, but it doesn't necessarily pertain to how the exact method of navigation is implemented in the aircraft. In aviation, the umbrella term for this kind of navigation is "RNAV", a somewhat counterintuitive backronym for "area navigation". Basically, it means your aircraft is capable of determining its position (subject to some quantifiable error) and navigating to an arbitrary set of geographic coordinates, rather than following ground-based navigational beacons. How the position is determined depends on the exact kind of RNAV system you have installed. Most modern airliners have a highly accurate dual- or triple-redundant inertial reference system (IRS), in addition to (usually) two GPS receivers and a couple of ground-based navigational aid receivers (usually VOR/DME). The aircraft's flight management computers (again, usually at least two) then use a complicated set of filtering algorithms to combine these inputs and compute an actual aircraft position and a CEP (circular error probable) value, which is then interpreted and displayed in the cockpit as a navigational precision value. RNAV procedures are designed for a minimum required navigational precision. Therefore, the loss of GPS reception doesn't manifest in the aircraft suddenly losing all sense of where it is located. Instead, the FMCs simply interpret it as the loss of a source of position data and carry on using the remaining good sources. Even without GPS, the inertial reference systems are highly accurate and rarely exceed more than +-1NM positional error even on very long flights. To further limit IRS drift, most modern FMCs automatically use the ground-based navigational aid receivers for periodic adjustments of the IRS platforms. They autotune a nearby VOR/DME station, read off magnetic radial and distance information and use that to correct IRS drift. This all before we even get into systems such as WAAS or SBAS, which are specifically designed to quickly detect and correct GPS transmission errors. High-quality aircraft GPS systems also include a set of features called RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring), which means the GPS equipment will perform a receiver and predictive signal integrity check prior to commencing a critical phase of flight that might be dependent on the GPS equipment operating correctly.
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.
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.