Our nation’s air traffic control system, operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), may or may not have been a factor in the January 29 collision of a Blackhawk helicopter and a small commercial jet that claimed 67 lives over Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport. President Trump is right to focus on fixing the antiquated system, as he committed to do in public remarks a week later. Chronic flight delays, a reflection of limited airspace capacity, cost passengers and airlines billions of dollars a year. Increasingly, air traffic control problems represent a threat to aviation safety. Witness the post-COVID-19 surge in near-collisions due in part to controller shortages and the lack of collision-prevention technology on most runways.
Unfortunately, Trump’s proposed fix—a “great, computerized system… [something] brand new…done by two or three companies”—is more of the same. In 2007, the Bush administration unveiled its multibillion-dollar “Next Generation Air Transportation System” to modernize air traffic control and triple its capacity by 2025. A recent report by the Department of Transportation quantifies what airlines and other stakeholders already knew: After nearly two decades, NextGen has delivered only limited benefits.
It gets worse. According to a blue-ribbon safety panel created in response to the near collisions, federal budget processes and other structural constraints have led to inadequate reinvestment in legacy systems even as they have impeded NextGen from delivering significant new capabilities and efficiencies. One constraint is federal budgeting rules that require agencies to fully pay for capital investments up front, out of current appropriations, preventing the FAA from financing long-term technology investments. Given the slow pace at which the FAA can afford to implement them, new systems are often obsolete by the time they are fully deployed. A second constraint takes the form of political directives that the FAA maintain legacy systems to accommodate powerful users who have not yet equipped their aircraft to utilize the replacement technology. Political interference has also prevented the FAA from closing facilities it no longer needs at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The growing cost of maintaining legacy systems has driven up the FAA’s Operations budget, which goes largely for air traffic control, at the expense of its facilities and equipment (F&E) budget, which funds new technology and facilities. According to Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, in 1991, funding for operations was 1.9 times that for F&E; by 2021, that figure had grown to 3.6—a dramatic shift.
The safety panel paints a dire picture of the condition of FAA legacy systems and facilities. Many of the FAA’s systems are so old it can no longer get spare parts. Ironically, NextGen’s demands on the FAA’s long-stagnant F&E budget have in some ways increased the challenge of aging equipment.
Economists, independent policy analysts, and other experts have long agreed on the underlying problem:
One, air traffic control is not an inherently governmental function. Keeping planes safely separated is a complex but purely operational process that follows well-established rules. Like running an airline or manufacturing a commercial aircraft, air traffic control can be performed by a non-governmental entity as long as it is overseen by FAA safety regulators, a function that is inherently governmental.
Two, precisely because of the operational nature of air traffic control, the federal government is poorly suited to run the system. The consensus of countless commissions and expert reports is that air traffic management is a 24/7 high-tech service “business” trapped in a regulatory agency that is constrained by federal budget and acquisition rules, burdened by a flawed funding mechanism (ad valorem taxes on passenger tickets rather than cost-based fees on airlines and other users), and micromanaged by Congress and the Office of Management and Budget.
Three, the current arrangement is flawed on safety grounds because the FAA both operates and regulates the air traffic control system—a clear conflict of interest and one that the International Civil Aviation Organization has long directed member countries to eliminate.
Despite broad agreement on the problem, efforts to take air traffic control out of the FAA so that it can operate like a public utility have repeatedly failed. In 2018, the House of Representatives declined to take up legislation approved by the House Transportation Committee that would have moved the air traffic control system to a self-supporting nonprofit corporation, leaving the FAA as an independent safety regulator. The first Trump administration strongly backed the proposal, which had a long and bipartisan lineage: 23 years earlier, the Clinton administration had tried to transfer air traffic control to a quasi-private U.S. Air Traffic Services Corporation (USATS).
The Clinton administration’s 1995 bill to create USATS was dead on arrival in Congress primarily because of the pushback from private pilots and corporate jet owners, who pay almost nothing to use the air traffic control system. Even though the USATS bill held both groups harmless, allowing them to continue to pay a low fuel tax, neither group trusted the federal government to keep its word. That distrust was sown largely by trade associations seeking to justify their existence.
The same dynamic played out in 2018. In addition to protecting private pilots, the House bill preserved the subsidy to corporate jets, which represents a transfer of $1 billion or more a year from the crowded passengers in coach to the Point One Percenters flying in their $65 million Gulfstreams. Skeptical that such largesse would continue under the new order, the self-serving jet-set trade association, flying under the cover of the much larger private pilot lobby, plied Congress with campaign contributions to keep air traffic control stuck in the last century.
The rest of the world got the memo. Whereas in 1995 only four countries had separated air traffic control from the aviation safety regulator, now more than 60 have done so. Canada’s non-governmental air traffic control provider (Nav Canada), the model for the 2018 House bill, is handling 50% more traffic with 30% fewer people than in 1996, and it beats the FAA on unit costs despite its smaller scale. Scott McCartney, who for many years wrote The Wall Street Journal’s “Middle Seat” column, observed that flying north to south over the U.S.-Canadian border “is like time travel for pilots (as) you leave a modern air-traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up.”
President Trump is on the right track in seeking to fix the air traffic control system. But his proposal to insert new technology into the current system is destined to fail. Instead, he should make the case to Congress to take the system out of the FAA and allow it to operate like a public utility. The technology will take care of itself. Corporate jet owners will balk, but that can only improve the president’s image among those of us in coach.