Flying Too High

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2000 by Stephen Pomper

How does the subsidy work? Watch closely: First consider that general aviation pilots use about 58 percent of tower services and constitute 20 percent of overall air-traffic-control activity nationwide (according to an FAA-commissioned 1995 cost allocation study). But the amount that the GA sector pays toward the maintenance of the air traffic control infrastructure is close to trivial: The fuel tax that small planes pay only covers about 3 percent of the total annual costs of that infrastructure. And the remaining 97 percent? It gets picked up by commercial-airline passengers in the form of ticket taxes and other charges. Put another way, in recent years commercial-airline passengers have wound up footing the bill for between $800 million and $1 billion per year that the general aviation crowd should be paying.

To be fair, the recreational pilots who fly planes like the single engine Piper Cub, and constitute roughly three quarters of the general aviation fleet, are getting much less of a free ride than the business jets. While they do use some services--like FAA weather reports--single engine pilots tend to fly at low altitudes, out of the range of air traffic controllers, and to and from airports that don't even have tower facilities. Business jets, however, can make no such claim. Planes like the Gulfstream V--which flies at jumbo-jet altitudes and can zoom from New York to Tokyo in nonstop whisper-smooth luxury--command the same amount of attention from the air traffic control system as any commercial jet. When landing, they get the same first-come-first-serve treatment--meaning that a Gulfstream carrying one portly executive and a lot of gin gets precedence over a 747 carrying 350 passengers in steerage accommodations if it lines up first. Indeed, business and commercial jets are treated the same in all material respects--except the amount that they pay into the system.

But that's outrageous! Well, yes. But the outrage could be addressed by charging user fees that make private planes pay for the services they consume, if Congress could just muster the political will to do it. For a while in the mid-'90s there was a glimmer of hope that Congress might take on at least the business jet set. Recreational pilots were viewed as a lost cause--too rich and ornery, too much the marginal users, and too likely to do something stupid and unsafe (like stop calling in for weather reports) in order to avoid user fees. But the business crowd was such a richly appropriate target. How many Congressmen would want to stand up and defend the right of CEOs like Warren Buffet and his aptly-named corporate jet, the Indefensible, to zoom through the stratosphere on a taxpayer subsidy? The mid-90s saw both the White House and Senate Transportation Committee (chaired by John McCain) introduce user- fee proposals that sought to divide and conquer the general aviation community by exempting recreational users and simultaneously socking it to business aviation.

Unfortunately, what sounded good in theory didn't work in practice--in part because AOPA wouldn't play ball. Rather than isolate the business jet community, and alienate a small but immensely affluent group of constituents, AOPA linked arms with the other business plane lobbyists--the National Business Aircraft Association and General Aviation Manufacturers Association. This made it impossible to take on the corporate fat cats without attacking the more numerous and politically powerful weekend hobbyists--which no one in Washington has had the courage to do for years. The issue died.