If anyone wonders why our air traffic system is in a steady state of decay, take a look at recent action and inaction in Washington DC. The 110th Congress punted funding decisions to the incoming 111th Congress with a limited continuing resolution that expires in March 2009 and a GAO lawyer concluded recently that the FAA has no authority to auction slots at NYC airports.
The results will be more of the same. We have a regulatory and governing bureaucracy that excels at destructive micromanagement and unproductive bickering. Once again airline passengers are being ignored, inconvenienced and ultimately put at risk. Our current financial crisis seems to provide the model for the coming air traffic disaster. Credit dried up in the face of sub-prime mortgages that found Congress with its collective head in the sand as warning after warning piled up and the banking sector deteriorated. Next, our air traffic will freeze up with a major incident that more than likely will cost more than money.
The current congressional model for dealing with our financial and transportation infrastructure historically follows similar paths. Senators and representatives ignore growing problems until there is a major problem and then they throw money (a lot more money is spent had the problem not been ignored) at the problem.
It takes a bridge collapse in Minneapolis to wake up our lawmakers to problems with highway and bridge maintenance. After years of warnings, it takes a series of bankruptcies of America’s largest financial and insurance institutions to finally generate action. I guarantee that if action had been taken years ago while warnings were swirling through Wall Street and Washington the rescue would not have been anything near a mind-boggling $700 billion.
Now, we are following the same footsteps with our air traffic system. Even when airlines find themselves facing late departures almost 50 percent of the time, when tie-ups in the New York City airspace affect on-time departures and arrivals across the country and when jet fuel costs keep rising making delays costly in terms of energy as well as wasted time, our regulators and lawmakers can’t discipline themselves to do their jobs.
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I think it would be better to separate the FAA into its regulatory component and its service component. The service component, particularly the provision of air traffic control infrastructure and personnel, should be vested in a government owned corporation that charges for its services and has the authority to develop infrastructure using its own resources, without requiring an appropriation from Congress. As a government owned corporation it would still be accountable to Congress, and as a service provider in the aviation industry, subject to regulatory oversight by the FAA’s regulatory branch, which would continue to regulate airlines, aircraft manufacturers and aviation services, funded by appropriation from Congress.
Whenever an essential service provider is dependant upon Congressional appropriations to fund infrastructure, we can always rely on Congress waiting until the service has failed to do anything. Congress has a multitude of very loud voices clamoring for public funds. By combining the regulatory and service provider components in one agency, we are assured that those in the aviation industry with a vested interest in ensuring less regulatory oversight will lobby Congress to limit the funding that is provided to the FAA. I am sure the airlines would love a more efficient ATC system that increased the productivity of their fleets, they just don’t want the FAA provided with more resources because that would boost the regulatory arm as well.