by
Darryl Phillips
This letter came from Redding CA:
Dear Darryl:
As a new pilot (125 hours), I am watching the ATC privatization issue and trying to formulate an opinion, and so read your essay in GAN&F (March 94) with great interest. I must say however, as a former telephone worker, that your analogy with the telephone system is totally erroneous.
The safety issues brought up in the Carterphone case were real. There was no FCC standard for telephone connectivity, so there was no way to insure that a piece of non-Bell equipment would not raise havoc with the system. Since the system at that time was largely comprised of electromechanical switches, you couldn't just "reboot" the computer, as is now more or less the case, in the event that something caused several hundred switches to hang up. Getting the picture?
You say, "When control was wrested from the giant monopoly, we all gained." Hardly. My phone always worked perfectly before divestiture. If it didn't, I called repair service and it would be fixed or replaced within hours. The PUC saw to that. The last phone my wife brought home from the local department store falls off the counter every time you pick up the receiver because of poor design and balancing. Ma Bell would never have built a piece of junk like that, because they owned it and had to service it. Further, to imply that fax machines, modems, call waiting, worldwide dialing are available because of competition in the industry is nonsense. Bell labs and ATT pioneered most of those services and is directly responsible for the technology that gives us world-wide dialing, communications satellites, etc. You even imply that if ATT still had a monopoly we couldn't have 911. Get real. That ATT would have held back providing any of those services, when they held a monopoly on all of the potential profits is positively ill-thought out and irrational.
Break up the monopoly and let us pay for the services we desire? Right. My phone installation used to cost a flat $45. Now, $80-100 for a phone, $25 for connection charges, $40 per hour for inside wiring, etc., etc. What a deal! I can see it how: $15 to call FSS for a weather report. $5 to make a PIREP. $10 each for FSS to read you NOTAMs. $25 for an approach to class C airspace, maybe $45 for class B, $15 landing fee at a controlled airport, $2 a minute for ground control, (better find a tiedown pronto, Bub).
There may be good reasons for privatizing ATC, but you certainly haven't presented any. Go do your homework and try again. I'm still waiting to be convinced.
Yours Truly, Robert L. Smith, D.C.
Dear Robert,
Thanks for your thoughtful letter. Whether we agree or disagree, each letter is read and re-read, and they all matter.
A little background. I received my FCC First Class Radiotelephone license at the age of 15 in 1954. A tinkerer as long as I can remember, I was intrigued by the inner mysteries of the phone system and used to explore as far as I could without getting caught. During high school, I worked at a large radio station and we interfaced closely with Ma Bell. As you can see, I had some experience with the phone company before the courts broke it up.
The Carterphone case happened. That is fact, not opinion. The gadget did not connect to the phone lines. It had no safety implications and the phone company knew it, but they sued anyway. Ma Bell had a monopoly and maintaining that grip on the market was their #1 concern. They didn't use the legal system to assure safety, but to assure their 100% market share. Safety was their excuse because it's so difficult to argue against safety. This is exactly the same tactic FAA uses to keep us subdued. Don't you remember the phone company's prohibition on plastic covers for phone books? There is no safety consideration there, just a desire to maintain total hold on all aspects of the market, including advertising sales.
Would we have had technical advances anyway? Of course. At least I hope so. But if ATC is any comparison, maybe not. Our Air Traffic Control system has less capacity today than five years ago, and much less than five years before that. As the competitive communications industry moves rapidly ahead, the ATC monopoly cannot even hold still and is moving backwards. I can only assume Ma Bell would have done better.
Yes, there are junk phones out there today, and there are people who purchase them. Also an amazing number of very strange phones I wouldn't be caught dead with. But that's the essence of freedom, there are clothes and cars out there I wouldn't choose also. Free market. The very thing we're missing in monopolistic Air Traffic Control.
Personal flying is slipping toward extinction. I'm fortunate to have flown for the past 30 years. Believe me, it really used to be different. My instructor talked of growing up on a farm in Minnesota. They had a Taylorcraft, in winter they put it on skis. As soon as his legs were long enough to reach the rudder pedals he was allowed to fly. He told of laying ski tracks across each field, lifting over the fences, then tracks across the next field.... Can you imagine how incensed Washington would be if a kid did that today? But it produced a pilot who knew how to FLY.
In this world everything has a price. Sometimes the price is in dollars but more often the cost pops up somewhere else. Air Traffic Control is charging society much more than the $45 for Class B airspace you cited. The non-fliers (all of society; taxpayers) are paying it in dollars, and the cost is being extracted from us pilots in other ways. Mostly in restrictions and prohibitions.
And that hurts more than $45 worth.
There is no free lunch. If we impose a cost on society, it will get back at us one way or another. Pilots think if ATC doesn't charge us to enter the airspace then it is free. Bull! The 10,000 millions of dollars a year that FAA costs is not free. There are 191,753 civil aircraft in this country (1992 figures). That's airliners to single place homebuilts, everything with an N number. Divide 10 billion dollars by 191,753 and you come up with a cost of $52,150 per plane, per year. Somebody is paying it. If it's not the flier, then it's the skier or the scuba diver or the couple on the ocean cruise. I don't want to pay their bills, they shouldn't be required to pay mine. And I cannot afford $52,150 per year in addition to the cost of the plane, fuel, and maintenance.
If your plane's share of ATC is $52,150 and you fly 200 hours per year, you are costing society $260 per hour for ATC services today. I'd rather pay $45 occasionally to enter their airspace. Better yet, I'd rather land outside it. Today we don't have a choice, the invisible meter keeps running.
It might be more fair to divide total flight hours (43.1 million in 1992) into the cost. This yields a figure of $232 for each hour. Not much better than $260, is it? Or we might bill each licensed pilot an equal share, that amounts to $14,642 per year for each of us whether we fly or not.
Perhaps we could pro-rate ATC expense based on fuel consumption, that would share the cost more equitably since bigger planes burn more fuel but carry more people. But no matter which trick we try it comes back to the same basic problem. There aren't enough airplanes, there aren't enough pilots, there isn't enough aviation to support this cancerous growth called ATC.
So what is the answer? Do we give up, or do we find a cheaper way to keep planes from bumping into each other? I love flying and I do not want to give it up. And no government should take it from me, wars have been fought over less.
But I should pay my own bills, so should you, and the only path I see is to break up ATC so we can purchase whatever we choose. Stop feeding that cancer.
"Fascinating." That's the word Ross Perot uses. I find it fascinating that the same people who are afraid of socialized medicine are in favor of socialized Air Traffic Control.