Who Will Make Key ATC Decisions?
One of the biggest gripes I hear when talking with knowledgeable people about the FAA’s reauthorization proposal is that it does not meaningfully reform “governance” of the ATC system. If Congress were to enact something like the sweeping reform of funding proposed in the measure, thereby aligning the growth of revenue for ATC with the growth of flight activity and hence system workload, it would go a long way toward fixing the funding system’s looming structural problem. (That problem is that the main current funding source (the ticket tax) is linked to the number of passengers carried, but the ongoing trend is for those passengers to be carried in smaller and smaller units: narrow-bodies instead of wide-bodies, RJs instead of narrow-bodies, fractionals instead of RJs, etc. But ATC workload (and hence cost) is driven directly by the number of aircraft in the system. Hence, the proposal to shift to direct fees for en-route and terminal-area ATC services.) Fixing the funding problem wit
