Air Traffic Control: As the partial government shutdown drags on, the nation's air traffic controllers warn that it's putting the safety of air travel at risk. Here's a solution: Privatize the air traffic control system.
XOn Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced flight delays at several major airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers. That followed a statement released earlier in the week, in which the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, along with pilots' and flight attendants' unions, said that "air safety environment … is deteriorating by the day."
The statement goes on to say that "we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break."
Shutdown and Air Travel
We're not in a position to judge whether the dire warnings of risk are valid, or hyperbole from government workers tired of waiting for their paychecks to show up. Obviously as the shutdown, now in its fifth week, drags on, the strain on various government workers and functions will increase.
The shutdown is clearly starting to have an impact on airport operations. In addition to the delays, Southwest Airlines said Thursday that it will lose up to $15 million this month because of the shutdown's impact on travel. Delta Air Lines said it will likely lose $25 million.
But all of this raises a question: Why is the nation's air traffic control system at the mercy of a federal budget standoff at all?
We noted in this space last week that the shutdown exposed why lawmakers should return the TSA back to the private sector.
Similarly, there's no good reason for the ATC to be a government-run organization. And many reasons why it should the U.S. should follow in the footsteps of several other industrialized nations — including Canada — that have successfully privatized their air traffic control.
Benefits of Privatization
Beyond freeing the ATC from federal government budget battles, it would give the ATC the opportunity to do something it hasn't been able to do for decades: upgrade its technology, improve its operations, run more efficiently and better manage its workforce.
As it stands, the ATC, like so many other functions of government, is a tangle of waste and mismanagement.
For years the Federal Aviation Administration, which runs the ATC and regulates air safety, has been the subject of blistering audits from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Transportation's inspector general.
Cost overruns and delays have plagued the ATC's efforts to modernize its antiquated equipment. Started in 2004, the FAA's so-called NextGen project won't be finished until sometime after 2025. Year after year, its failures have been exposed by devastating audits.
In 2017, the inspector general said basically that the FAA has botched the upgrade, finding, among other things that it "lacked effective management controls."
At the same time, the ATC has for years suffered a shortage of flight controllers, and received stern warnings that it had to fix its staffing problems.
Last year, the Air Traffic Controllers union complained that the government is losing controllers faster than it can hire new ones. The head of the union said that "we're at a 30-year low of certified controllers in a system."
It doesn't have to be this way.
Canada Is A Role Model
Take Canada as an example. In 1996, that country moved its air traffic control system from a government agency to a private nonprofit called NavCanada. Unlike the ATC, NavCanada is self-funded, so it isn't at the mercy of federal budget battles.
As a result, it's been able to modernize and improve operations. Even the ATC union boss admits that NavCanada is "developing probably the best equipment out there ... And they're doing it in a 30-month to three-year time frame."
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The UK, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland have likewise offloaded their formerly government-run air traffic control systems.
President Donald Trump has been advocating that the U.S. follow in their footsteps since he took office. Unfortunately, the GOP-controlled Congress did nothing.
Will Pelosi Listen To Workers?
And even though the controllers' unions support the idea of privatization, any type of Trump-supported privatization is sure to go nowhere with Democrats running the House.
When Trump first broached the subject, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed it as an attempt to "hand control" of the ATC to "special interests and the big airlines."
Then again, maybe she'll listen to the controllers themselves. Because their troubles won't end when the government shutdown does.
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