Feds still make the best sky cops - Symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 31, 1994 | by Phil Boyer

Vice President Al Gore's program to "reinvent government" is a valiant attempt to streamline the federal bureaucracy, adopt progressive management techniques and reduce the federal deficit. We must admire his goals.

One of these initiatives, however, is not well-founded -- spinning off air traffic control, or ATC, to a quasi-governmental corporation. This is a defective concept and misstates ATC's current condition and needed remedies.

The vice president says air traffic control is operated inefficiently, costs too much and bears the seed of catastrophe in its antiquated equipment.

That's quite a charge when speaking of the world's safest, most efficient ATC system, which daily directs the air travel of several million of Gore's fellow citizens.

And just like the administration's stunt of showcasing old-style vacuum tubes (about 1 percent of ATC computers and radars are still run by vacuum tubes instead of microcircuits), the debate so far has generated more heat than light. Vacuum tubes, the supposed symbol of Federal Aviation Administration behind the times, are used in only 558 pieces of ATC equipment. Some of these units are in only irregular or standby use, and at least half already are scheduled for replacement within two years.

Changes in our ATC system must be considered in regard to issues of appropriate governance and realistic funding, not a trumped-up safety issue. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association certainly has been a critic of the FAA during the years, but today's ATC system is safe.

In fact, one might challenge the safety and regulatory impact of a corporation-run ATC system, since the Air Traffic Service is the FAA's "eyes and ears" for their enforcement efforts. With the FAA thus cut off from daily participation in oversight and control of air traffic, what would happen to its remaining regulatory functions?

I'm not implying that proponents of privatization advocate a system that deliberately would put the flying public at risk. But if the new corporation is driven, in part, by the commercial carriers' bottom line, there is the concern of placing an economic priority above the safety imperative.

It may be argued that the administration's concern about "unfriendly skies" is designed to frighten the public into supporting corporate ATC. Recall the campaign in the 1970s designed to ridicule the Post Office Department into extinction. It worked.

We now have the U.S. Postal Service, no longer directly accountable to Congress, and the price of stamps rises while service deteriorates.

When Vice President Gore and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena unveiled their sketchy ATC Inc. plan last May, their dramatic backdrop of Washington National Airport's rushhour traffic backfired. As they held aloft old vacuum tubes and cried "catastrophe," heavy air traffic was deftly handled right behind them on National's three intersecting runways.

And earlier that morning, I had lifted off in an aircraft from a runway 2,000 miles away to fly across the continent into one of the world's busiest airports -- without a hitch. Believe me, our system is the safest in the world.

Today's system is not really a problem. We should be concerned, however, with the ability of the FAA to acquire and integrate new technology to meet future traffic growth. We should change the cumbersome procurement and personnel procedures of federal bureaucracy that keep the FAA from doing this efficiently. But that doesn't justify the call to remove ATC from government.

Where problems in the system exist, let's fix them, rather than create a parallel bureaucracy less accountable to the public. What's wrong with the FAA can be fixed by a simple act of Congress releasing it from one-size-fits-all government personnel and procurement regulations.

Aircraft pilots whole-heartedly support efforts to trim the federal deficit, cut excess government spending and judiciously downsize bureaucracy. We, too, are long-suffering taxpayers. By and large, pilots predominantly are conservative and business-oriented.

But while we are supporters of the business ethic and skeptical of government capabilities, many pilots aren't sure that corporate ATC will trim expenses. The General Accounting Office isn't sure, either. Speaking to a Senate committee in May, Allen Li, GAO director of transportation issues, disputed the Clinton administration's assertion that an ATC corporation would save money and speed modernization of the system.

Citing Amtrak as a corporate organization that deferred maintenance and retained old equipment because of financial problems, Li declared that "changing to a corporate structure in the transport sector does not necessarily correlate with success or serve as a panacea for the problems of the predecessor organization."

Li told committee members that a 10-year review of FAA acquisition programs showed cost and schedule problems mainly occurred because of technological difficulties, complicated by management factors. Among other obstacles, he cited "poor contractor performance, inadequate contractor oversight and frequent turnover in FAA administrators."