|
United States Pilots Association |
This letter is in answer to your recent column regarding the air traffic control funding debate. I would like to set the issue out there for all to see and understand.
The FAA under current Administrator Marion Blakey has set out on a course to "Outsource" it's services to private companies. We have been told this is being done to save money and to improve service. It has thus far done neither. Lockheed Martin was given the "sweetheart contract" and has been fined millions of dollars at least once for rendering poor service. That has not stopped them from coming back and asking for much more money to help overcome some of their deficiencies.
Now Ms. Blakey wants to outsource the management of the Air Traffic Control System to the airlines. Her claim is the current method of funding will not pay for the costs of hiring controllers and reengineering the "new generation" of equipment she says is necessary to upgrade the present system.
In addition, it is proposed the airlines will receive a cumulative One Billion dollar tax break, with this money ostensibly to be paid from fees assessed on flights of small aircraft.
Let us look at the airlines. They schedule more flights from a hub airport at the same time than the airport can handle. They encounter weather delays that imprison passengers for hours at a time in planes with no food and poor restroom facilities. Baggage is lost routinely. We are herded like cattle through the TSA lines in the expectation we are receiving security. What we are receiving is another huge boondoggle set up after 9/11. We are then shoehorned into aircraft seats barely wide enough for a ten year old child, and we receive peanuts and soft drinks.
The answer here is do not change the FAA funding system. Instead, add more runways at major airports. Force the airlines to offer more realistic scheduling to provide spacing between arriving and departing flights.
We who have taken the trouble to learn to fly and who own small airplanes are not the problem. Most of us will avoid the airline hub airports, not wishing to be sequenced between two airliners.
The problem is the market has created an alternative to the airlines. It is called the VLJ or very light jet. These six seat airplanes can fly from most any airport, at a time convenient to their passenger's requirements. They are relatively inexpensive, and hundreds if not thousands have been ordered. This is what the airlines are afraid of. These planes will siphon off the business traveler who is tired of dealing with the aforementioned inconveniences. They burn far less fuel and travel at almost the same speed as the airliners.
Do not be fooled by the naysayers who wish to add additional expense (taxes and fees) to small planes. We pay every time we buy fuel. The tax monies generated by our fuel taxes has helped fund the FAA for many years, and the fund has never been in trouble.
This issue is not about percentages of usage of the air traffic control system. It is about more subsidies to an industry that cannot get its act together, coupled with a government trying to further bail the airlines out of future bankruptcy. When the retiring President of America West Airlines can receive a $300,000,000 bonus while the rest of us eat peanuts, this should tell the whole story.
Stephen D. Uslan, President
United States Pilots Association