Why doesn’t America get with the rest of the world?
Why doesn’t America get with the rest of the world?
F rom 2009 up until last month, there were no fatal U.S. commercial passenger-jet accidents. But in the past two weeks, there have been two deadly crashes: one at Reagan National Airport in Washington and one in Alaska. No one knows yet exactly what caused them, but we do know our antiquated air traffic control system cries out for reform.
Last Thursday, President Trump promised a “great, computerized system” of air traffic control, something “brand new . . . done by two or three companies.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says he has already contacted Elon Musk’s DOGE team and asked him “to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”
Duffy has already moved to increase the number of qualified air traffic controllers by lifting their mandatory retirement age from 56 to something closer to the 65-year cap for airline pilots. A 2023 report from the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General found that three-fourths of our most important air traffic centers had controller staffing shortages.
Musk, the founder and owner of SpaceX, can help with new technology. U.S. controllers still move paper flight strips from one controller’s station to another, a process that Canada and other nations modernized 20 or more years ago. Currently, the strips aren’t due to be phased out in the U.S. until 2032. See the 1 minute, 15 second mark here:
Other than France, the U.S. is the only industrialized country where the same bureaucracy is responsible for both promoting air travel and overseeing air safety. “The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself,” former New York Times reporter John Tierney concluded in a report for the Manhattan Institute.
All over the world, dozens of countries have autonomous providers or public-private partnerships handling air traffic control. They are better at technology innovation and making sure they have enough trained employees. A Government Accountability Office study has found that in countries that have moved away from the U.S. model, there are fewer delays, and costs are lower.
“Unlike Canada’s and Europe’s air traffic control providers, which set their own budgets based on their user fee revenue, the FAA’s system depends on Congress for tax funding, and Congress has short-changed both capital and operating budgets for years,” Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation told me.
So why doesn’t America get with the rest of the world? The first Trump administration came close to brokering an agreement to move in that direction. A bill transferring air safety to a nonprofit corporation passed a House committee with bipartisan support. The bill was backed by the union representing air traffic controllers, unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and all former heads of the Department of Transportation.
But Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a former official with the U.S. Department of Transportation, told me that too many members of Congress followed the dictates of labor unions that “advocate keeping the same people in the same jobs.” In addition, groups representing private plane owners, which feared that landing fees for their members would be raised, were opposed. The deal fell apart and didn’t make it to the House floor.
But the two recent accidents, along with the many near misses reported each year, may create a new sense of urgency. It’s been 30 years since then–Vice President Al Gore led a federal task force on “reinventing” government that called for a new air traffic control model. If DOGE and Trump can make the argument that reform would both improve air safety and reduce flight delays, it’s possible that ancient Washington gridlock can finally be broken.