Well yes and no. Years ago I worked for the Bell System. They had an exemplary safety record - but they also had a strong union and vigorous government oversight. Today Verizon has less of both. I don’t know if job and customer safety has gotten better or worse.
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I agree this is a bad idea, but I think there’s too much emphasis placed on innovations from new actors. The barriers to entering the airline industry are already enormous: just the cost of leasing or purchasing enough airplanes to create a viable business means rough-and-tumble startups aren’t going to flood into the airline industry like this is a market for phone apps.
Because the costs of running an airline are huge, the only real “innovation” to occur in the last 10 years is massive cost-cutting in the form of a la carte pricing. Spirit nickel and dimes you for everything, and while it’s usually the cheapest fare, it’s also loathsome.
Privatizing the FAA is a bad idea, but not because we’d somehow be losing out on great ideas from young upstarts who want to enter the airline industry.
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And not one word on the universally reviled TSA? Dude had an opportunity to hand something (back) to the airlines that would have won praise and had a chance to pass congress. We are governed by cartoon villains.
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One important point lost in this article is that the FAA has two separate roles: Air Safety (regulation) and Air Traffic Control.
Privatizing ATC is not a crazy idea. It’s been tried in a few countries (like Canada), and while I’m not an expert, I’m skeptical that it delivers the promised improvements in cost and efficiency. Nevertheless it can be done safely.
On the other hand, making airlines self-regulating (privatizing the Air Safety role of the FAA) is nuts. Self-regulation has been tried in a lot of other industries, and while it’s better than no regulation, it tends to lead to the least amount of oversight the industry thinks it can get away with.
It is extremely important to know whether the proposal on the table is to privatize just ATC or the whole ball of wax. When privatization came up in the past in the U.S. it was only about ATC: the FAA would retain its regulatory role. This article makes it sound like the new proposal would privatize everything, but I’m not clear whether it would do that or not.
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It’s my understanding that Canada privatized their ATC and they have been successful. Is this because or in spite of privatization? I really know nothing about this beyond what I’ve been reading in the news the past couple of days. My knee jerk reaction to this is, “what a fucking awful idea.”
I wonder if there will be new ticket surcharges for an “improved” ATC experience? “Nice flight you have there, shame if something were to happen to it.”
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This pretty much how I reacted when I happened to catch this as breaking news on a tv set … while stuck at O’Hare for four hours yesterday. What the actual fuck… Make airlines safer! Wait, I thought that was why I had to take off my fucking flip-flops and throw away the water that i bought six minutes earlier in the airport…? And my personal favourite is watching the TSA asshat flipping a wheelchair over and examining every square cm of it … y’know, the wheelchair that the hapless traveller was loaned BY THE AIRLINE, TEN FEET AWAY.
Now with this privatisation, apparently, we’ll no longer have to tolerate all those mid-air collisions that happen at airports…
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NavCan is run by a non-profit, if that helps…
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If the accounting and securities trading industries are anything to go by, letting companies regulate and police their own actions inevitably ends up in a massive fustercluck which screws over the public. In this case airline safety will be done in the cheapest and least safe way possible to keep profit margins tight.
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Cutting safety for profit is high odds to increase profit this quarter.
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In the 25 years I’ve lived in Hawaii, we started with 2 major carriers, Hawaiian and Aloha, and 3 or 4 local puddle-jumpers who flew into the airports that were too small to handle larger jets or turboprops. Now we have only one major interisland carrier, Hawaiian; the smaller airlines have restricted routes, can’t handle anything over 300 pounds and have limited cargo space. The small airlines also frequently disappear or get bought out; not hard when you have a fleet of 6 to 10 Caravans that collectively hold as many passengers as one 737. Aloha went belly up a decade ago, and every other carrier that tried to get into the market was crushed shortly after startup while struggling to get their feet under them (see Mahalo Air). Meanwhile, prices for interisland flights have risen from $39 to $89+ one way, and the interisland ferries have also been discontinued for assorted reasons, the only one remaining in service right now is the Lanai-Lahaina run. This means that if you want to fly less than 150 miles, you get to pay about as much per mile as it would cost you to generally drive to the airport.
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“Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes.”
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making flying unsafe would be counter to anything close to profitable for airlines. THey make money by having people in seats.
I feel that multiple people have responded to my initial post as if I am all for the airlines taking over the duties of the FAA. I am not for it. I do not think the argument against it should be “they will cut safety measures for greater profit margins”
That reasoning is flawed in my opinion because it would be so detrimental to their industry. As it stands today, flying is relatively one of the safest modes of transportation. When flight is unsafe it is most often catastrophic. Keeping it among the safer modes of transport is in their best interest as much as ours.
When Shuster put a bug in his ear about this in 2014 I can’t help but think trump thought this would be a great way to to stick it to the FAA and local government for plotting to direct flight patterns over Mar-a-Lago to spite him. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about if it could save money or the nightmare it could become, just that he could have influence over a privatized ATC. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much his grasp on it.
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Shuster comes from a family that has been gorging at the legislative trough for decades. His buddies are already queued up with knife and fork.
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The proposal in the U.S. is also to create a nonprofit. However, considering the NFL is a nonprofit, this does not necessarily indicate altruistic intentions.
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Your quaint belief in the market is very cute. Completely unrealistic, but very cute.
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Oh well. I then bow to your condescending and arrogant superiority. Clearly you know all, being a captain of industry and not having anything to back up your position. I shall yield the floor to you Mr. Trump.
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brb, buying shares in Qantas
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…primarily because of the FAA.
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I’m not trying to be a smartass here, this is a genuine question - Do you now, or have you ever worked for any length of time for a company that produces a product or provides a service that had safety regulations applied to them?
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