Flying Too High

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2000 by Stephen Pomper

A year after JFK Jr.'s crash, general aviation still enjoys stout subsidies and unsupervised skies

WHEN JOHN F. KENNEDY, JR. spiralled into the North Atlantic last year, there was some surprise in the press and public that he was allowed to go up into the moonless haze without the instrument training that might have allowed him to save himself and the unfortunate Bessette sisters. But the world of private flying is full of these kinds of surprises. It's the Wild Wild West meets Sherwood Forest stood on its head. Private flyers are regulated in theory, but hardly supervised in practice. This generally well-heeled group benefits from a hidden subsidy that gets funded out of commercial passengers' generally less deep pockets. And watching over this unsupervised, subsidized state of grace is one of Washington's most surprisingly powerful lobbies.

This is probably not news to you if you're already a member of the private plane community--known as general aviation, or simply "GA," in the trade. You've no doubt discovered, that if you own your own plane (or can get ahold of the keys to someone else's) you can swagger through any GA facility anywhere in the country without anybody checking to gee whether you have just consumed a pint of bourbon or three sheets of blotter acid, are carrying a neutron bomb under your arm, or haven't had your certification renewed since the Eisenhower administration. You need not file a flight plan (Kennedy didn't) unless you plan to cruise up high with the big jets. Even if you're not licensed to carry passengers for hire, nobody will check whether those guys getting in back are joy-riders, paying businessmen who want to beat the traffic into O'Hare, or a team of Libyan terrorists who are using you as their getaway car. No airborne cop is going to pull you over and question whether you've had one beer too many. You are--for all practical purposes--free from adult supervision.

Certainly, a fair amount of freedom is justified by the statistics; for example, the National Transportation Safety Board reports that in 1999 only about one percent of GA fatalities were alcohol related (an astonishingly low number given the 38 percent of road fatalities that were related to alcohol in 1998). Still, there is evidence to suggest that laissez faire is not always the best policy. Kennedy's ill-fated flight is a good example. So is last November's crash of a single engine aircraft into a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Newark, New Jersey. The incident claimed four lives, injured 25, and caused more than $1 million in property damage--and was all the more tragic because the pilot had taken a migraine painkiller called Fiorinal that should have kept him grounded. Then, two more crashes over ultra-populous New Jersey added reason for concern: In December a single-engine craft tumbled into a residential neighborhood in Hasbrouck Heights. And in August of this year, a single engine plane collided with a military charter over Burlington Township, killing 11 and destroying a couple's home in the process. Peering through the wreckage one can understand why Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has asked the FAA to consider whether a little more air traffic control on small planes flying over densely populated areas might make sense.

Although Lautenberg has a point, don't hold your breath waiting for big changes. Legal and policy shifts that GA don't want--safety regulations that might pin back their wings, and financial reforms that might trim back their subsidy--tend to happen over geologic time. For this, the GA set can thank a Frederick, Maryland lobbying group called the Airline Owners and Pilots Association--an organization that is so dogged, so effective, and so narrowly focused on its own agenda that it once earned the nickname "the NRA of the air."

Meet AOPA

Here's question: If you're lobby, and somebody compares you to the NRA, do you treat that as a good thing or a bad thing? Phil Boyer, the president of the AOPA, pauses a bit to reflect. There was a time, he points out, when the NRA's methods were tremendously effective and the analogy could only be perceived as a "huge compliment" Yes, AOPA could be obnoxious--Boyer's predecessor John L. Baker once bragged to The Washington Post that "We have the muscle to back up what we say. We're not go along to get along" But they sure got the job done--suing, bluffing, and stalling their way through a series of campaigns to keep major airports open to smaller craft and keep the government out of the little guy's cockpit. Bullyboy tactics haven't fared as well in recent years, however, and Boyer himself prefers a less antagonistic style. "I never found you got a lot done by shaking your fist all the time," he says, clenching one and waving it across the conference table at the back of his office. Instead, his preference has been "to negotiate with an open hand." Out comes an open palm, extended like a church greeter's on Easter morning.

But watch out for that hand--Boyer's methods may be different than from his predecessor's but his objectives are similar. U.S. News & World Report noted that the day after the Coast Guam pulled the wreckage of Kennedy's plane out of the drink, Boyer was on Capitol Hill waving around a chart announcing that: "JUDGEMENT CANNOT BE LEGISLATED." Reading between the lines, any legislator could have made out the message "LEAVE US ALONE" And when a lobbyist with 350,000 highly affluent, highly vocal, highly organized members makes a statement like that, you can bet that even the non-pilots on the Hill listen.