At the same time you are hauling 100 passengers through the sky making much more money for the airline which makes up for the taxes compared to right out of the pocket for the citation X owner. In reality the citation owner is technically paying more money than the airline.
You don't seem to understand how airlines have to deal with these taxes. The tax is passed on to the customer, but the "market rate" for the fares has a limit. If the airline's yield management department determines that a route can only support a $350 ticket, then that's the maximum that they can charge. If they're passing on taxes to the customer, then that become part of that $350 ticket. If the taxes were reduced, then the market rate for that route hasn't changed, so the airline can continue to charge $350, but the amount that used to go to tax will now go to normal revenue.
User fees are bad on any level. We have seen in the past that user fees that started with business aircraft do get to general aviation. It isn't a question of if, it is a question of when.
As I said, I'm not opposed to GA user fees. I simply pointed out that none of the proposals to date have included them. But you're probably correct that they would eventually spread to actual GA aircraft. I'm ok with that.
General aviation does fuel the airlines with pilots. Unless they want to pay for my flight training, user fees would be detrimental to the airlines in time.
If you think that the ATA hasn't taken that into account and considered all of the possible ramifications of user fees, then you don't know the ATA very well. The increased possible costs of training and compensation/benefits would pale in comparison to the massive tax burden that the airlines carry while corporate aviation basically gets a free ride.
Taking the stance of increased bargaining is very selfish. Yes you are looking out for your fellow airline pilots, but you are doing it at the expense of everyone else in aviation. That is including any future pilots who we should be encouraging instead of tearing down just to get an edge.
I'm not "tearing down" anyone that wants to get into this profession. You've said yourself that the airlines would still have to fill their slots for newhires, but they'd likely have to foot the bill for training. That's a
good thing for new air line pilots. These new air line pilots would also have a much better career to look forward to because of the laws of supply and demand within the labor market. As long as there are 10 pilots competing for 1 job, our leverage is extremely limited. A system that limits the supply would weed out the pilots that aren't really committed and don't have the aptitude for this job.
You do realize that taking the business jets out of the busy airports wont decrease congestion? They only are about 1-4% of the total traffic at these airports. They also spread themselves out much more as they land at many GA fields around the US as well.
I'm not concerned about the congestion in relation to this issue. I think that should be handled in they way that NY authorities proposed for LGA: limit the size of aircraft at slot-controlled airports to only airplanes that have 100+ seats. On a typical day in LGA, I'm in line behind 10 RJs and just one or two mainline airplanes. RJs are the problem. Replace the RJs with lower frequencies of mainline sized airplanes and many of the congestion issues are gone.
The only way to decrease congestion is for the airlines to spread their flights out around the US instead of having only 2 or 3 hubs where a majority of flights have to cycle through.
The deregulated system won't allow for this because massive cost saving are achieved through hub operations. A re-regulated system could better support a point-to-point route structure because of subsidies and fare controls, but the current system would never survive.
The house bill will work best as GA and business jets will get a fuel tax increase while the airlines will not get an increase in taxes. Once we go to user fees, general aviation in this country will crumble.
The airlines need their tax bill
cut, not just maintained.