Flying Too High

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2000 by Stephen Pomper

To be fair, there is something to the "leave us alone" approach. After all, the government can't be in the business of managing all of life's risks. We don't expect tree climbing, garlic chopping, or running on the pool deck to be dealt with in the Code of Federal Regulations, and these can all be plenty risky if approached with the wrong level of care or coordination. So why pick on small planes? Yes they're dangerous (1 out of 300 is involved in a fatal accident each year) but general aviation is in the public interest. Small planes reach the remote parts of the country not served by commercial airliners, perform rescue operations, and--why deny the economic benefits--they generate nearly $6 billion worth of factory billings each year. Furthermore, with Air Force enrollments down, general aviation supplies more than half of the airline pilots in the country. Indeed, the pull of the airlines on small plane pilots has been so dramatic that a recent Wall Street Journal article questioned the quality of the flight instructors left behind to teach. This all suggests that we need more GA pilots and that we should be encouraging people to take the risks GA involves, not trying to squelch the impulse.

But while there's some truth to that, it hardly means that the government should write a blank check for general aviators to take stupid risks--particularly since these so often have the capacity to put innocents in unnecessary danger. And unfortunately, in general aviation, there too often are innocents involved. The 342 fatal GA accidents in 1999 produced 628 deaths, meaning that more than a few non-pilots lost their lives. Indeed, if there's an argument to be made for a higher level of regulation, or that somebody should be on hand to give the pilot a once-over before he hits the tarmac (to make certain that he isn't blotto and confirm that he's qualified to fly the course he's got in mind), then these are the people with the most compelling interest at stake. True, their numbers aren't huge, and yes, the chances of a plane falling on any particular house are pretty darn small (something like 1 in 50 million, which according to the--ahem-AOPA safety fact sheet, are less than the odds of being bitten by a shark). But if you happened to own the house that those colliding planes fell on in Burlington Township, New Jersey, you might agree that it's worthwhile to think about relatively painless ways to make those numbers even lower--particularly as congestion of the airways increases.

Unfortunately, the GA lobby has never fully embraced this approach. Back in the 1980s, AOPA fought for its members' unencumbered "right to fly" as though it were enshrined in the Constitution. They were fond of arguing that airliners should have no priority over small planes. If the former were inconvenienced by the latter--too bad. After all, the airlines were no more than businesses and many of their passengers were just pleasure seekers--like much of the general aviation crowd; so why should commercial aviation get preferential treatment? That argument, which the lobby for some time used against the passage of regulations to restrict small craft from airspace around major airports, lost some of its appeal when a small plane collided with an AeroMexico DC 9 over Cerritos, California in 1986, killing 67 on board and 15 on the ground.