I have noticed

S

SkyyAngel

Well-Known Member
And I've commented on it before. But all the talk about the new ATIS being something along the lines of, "Only AmEx, MC, and Discover accepted at STL..." is really getting annoying. I know most of you are only joking.

But this is a serious issue for us and I doubt a lot of you realize it based on the way it's talked about. Sure we have our agencies like AOPA, NBAA and NATCA etc. fighting for us but they can only do so much and when the general aviation public makes stupid statements like that it literally gives me no hope.

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I think he/she is referring to the proposition of making ATC services a privately run business venture, rather than the government run agency it is now. Personally I dont think we will ever see it....we might see a reduction in manned towers, or more contract tower sevices, but i seriously doubt that the business of vectoring aircraft around the country at altititude is capable of handling a switch to the private sector...there is just too much to it. Not that I am an expert, but thats just how I feel.
 
I'm a she in case you were wondering.

And yes that's exactly what I'm talking about. And its been done before dozens of times so what exactly makes you think it can't be done?
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sorry "she"...wasnt sure.

I dont know....like i said, im not an expert, but it jsut seems like such an immense undertaking, with so much at stake that the power that be might debate, but ultimately i dont feel it will happen.

where has it happend before? id be interested to know where and when and how they did it.
 
I didn't take offense to the he/she don't worry about it.

It's been done all over the world. Canada (Nav Canada), Great Britain (NATS), Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and a dozen or so others.

I'm more familiar with NATS and Nav Canada. Nav Canada's been around since 1996, and I believe NATS was 1996 as well.

The major plan to do all this in the US can be found here:

www.rppi.org

NATS is called a public private partnership (ppp) basically almost half of it is still owned by the government and the other half is pieced out. Nav Canada is a full on private not-for-profit organization.

After looking into Nav Canada and what they've done, it looks like they COULD make it work if they treated their ATC better. There's been nothing but threats of striking practically since the thing was implemented.
 
A big problem that Nav Canada has faced is the fact that they are reliant mostly on the major airlines to provide funding. Granted, GA does pay a precentage of their revenues, but the majority of the money comes from commercial companies. In Canada this is really only one (well, two if you count WestJet). So as of last year AC owned NavCanada almost 50 million dollars (CA I assume) which amounted to a huge operation intake shortfall for NavCanada. It cascaded from there, especialy with AC going into the Canadian equivilant of chapter 11 last year. This essecially froze any funds that NavCanada was expecting to collect from them. The reason I don't think this would work in the US any better then it has up North is the protectionist stance that the US Government has taken with US airlines. With the frequency that airlines go into chapter 11, a commercial ATC company would have no way of knowing if they would be able to collect their fees. I hope somebody can expand on this because I only understand a very small part of it.

Ethan
 
NavCanada is also giving Air Canada huge breaks with their fees, while charging WJ pretty much the same but they have much less traffic. As far as Transport is concerned, go to the message board at avcanada.ca and there's plenty to read. There really are only a couple problematic people at Transport, but they ruin it for everyone else.
 
Well, there are a few things we need to do, other than rely on AOPA and NBAA and the rest of the alphabet soup to help us. The first thing is to write to your Congressional reps. Tell them that you think that despite what George Bush says, you feel that ATC is an inherent government function and that there should be no privatization of it.

Then write to Bush and tell him that you can't believe a pilot would spout off things like ATC not being an inherent government function. Do it more politely, but express your disappointment in him saying that, and remind him that it is going to be a very close election.
 
I just figured that coming from an address in a state where he spent a lot of time, and from a town in which his daughter lives and where he spent some time, it might get his attention.
 
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