Trump proposes privatizing USA air traffic control system

USA president Donald Trump formally announced on 5 June a proposal to privatise U.S. air traffic control (ATC) – a plan the president says will improve aviation efficiency and enable broad upgrades for outdated air traffic management systems.

President Trump wants to fill the gap with fees which airplane operators would have to pay every time a flight needs air traffic control.

President Trump’s proposal would take the air traffic control system away from the Federal Aviation Administration and hand it over to a private, non-profit organization.

Some airlines support the change, and executives joined the president in the East Room of the White House. “It’s a system where everyone benefits from this”, White House economic adviser Gary Cohn said in a conference call with reporters. During that trip, members viewed air traffic control operations at the Ottawa airport.

FAA air traffic controllers manage more than 50,000 flights per day.

The idea of privatizing air-traffic control has been floated since the 1990s – Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at times supported the concept – without success.

Under the plan, 38,000 FAA staffers, including 14,000 air traffic controllers, would be transferred to a nonprofit corporation run by a 13-member board drawn predominantly from the airline industry.

In an attempt to gain support for the plan, which fell short in Congress a year ago, the White House said the corporation’s board should be insulated from industry stakeholder groups.

Trump has been sharply critical of the FAA and chief administrator Michael Huerta, earlier this year saying that the FAA’s NextGen program was “out of whack”, and commenting that he’d like to see a pilot in the Administrator position.

He argued that moving the system to a private non-profit corporation will help speed up the shift from using land-based radar to using more precise GPS tools.

Meanwhile, Trump criticized efforts by the Obama administration to improve the air traffic control system, calling them “failed”.

“If an FAA tower has 10 controllers, say in a small tower in California or Arizona … and they were to go to a contract tower … they would get rid of probably five of those controllers”, he said.

The Trump administration wants to turn over control of the nation’s skies to private business.

The FAA is in the midst of a $38.5 billion modernization project, and agency head Michael Huerta told lawmakers last month that it has made “tremendous progress” on the upgrades.

The proposal, which would require congressional approval, is opposed by many Democrats and some Republicans.

For example, Delta is the only major airline that isn’t backing the plan, over concerns that privatizing such a big system could lead to a national security risk in addition to driving up prices for the consumer. The bill authorizes that corporation to impose user fees, which would replace the current tax on airline tickets.