Is privatizing the Air Traffic Control system an important idea?
I think it’s an important idea. If you look at the productivity increases in the U.S. airline industry, the average network airline has improved productivity from 20 to 35 percent. Even Southwest has improved productivity 20 percent. They went from 85 people per aircraft to a recent 67. United has gone from 160 people per aircraft down to 115 — about a 28 percent improvement in productivity. Now if you look at the Air Traffic Control system, 90 percent of the cost of the system is labor, and guess what? There’s been zero improved productivity over the last decade. They have outdated systems that need to be replaced. It’ll take tens of billions to modernize the ATC system and that’s part of the problem. Q: Should it be run by the airlines themselves? A: Not by the airlines but by a group of users of the airlines. If the users that paid for the system had some say, it would in fact be more efficient than being run by a government agency that has congressional meddling, so to speak. Righ
