Canada fixed its air traffic control decades ago. Why can't America?

A few days later, 10 people died when a regional airline flight crashed off the coast of Alaska. Shortly after that, there was a near-disaster in Chicago when a Southwest Airlines jet barely avoided colliding with a private plane that had entered the runway at Midway Airport without authorization. In May, the control center at Newark's Liberty Airport experienced a communications blackout when a burnt-out wire triggered an equipment failure, leaving air traffic controllers blind to arriving and departing aircraft for a minute and a half. It was one of three outages in the space of two weeks at Newark, where a shortage of controllers routinely causes flights to be delayed or cancelled.

Some of these tragedies and alarming incidents are still being investigated. But all of them are reminders that America's air traffic control system is in desperate need of reform.

There is no mystery about what ails air traffic control in this country: It is run by the government, which is ill-suited to the task. Worse yet, the agency that's in charge of providing air traffic control, the Federal Aviation Administration, is also the agency that regulates it — an inherent conflict of interest. As journalist John Tierney put it in a recent essay for City Journal: "The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we've put it in charge of watching itself."

That's only part of the problem. Because the FAA is an arm of the government, its operations, including air traffic control, are inevitably politicized. Since the agency has to be reauthorized annually, its funding is tied not to market forces but to the priorities of politicians, lobbyists, and interest groups. That chronic budgetary uncertainty has often forced the FAA to defer system upgrades and limit hiring — which is why the system is beset by outdated hardware and perpetually understaffed towers.

Happily, there is a straightforward solution: Get the federal government out of the air traffic control business.

For decades, policy makers, economists, industry experts, and even members of Congress have called for spinning off air traffic control into a standalone, user-funded corporation — either a nonprofit company or a public utility, one that would be regulated, but not operated, by the government. When President Clinton first proposed the idea in the mid-1990s, it was largely untested. At the time, only four countries had adopted such a policy. Thirty years later, roughly 80 countries have done so.

"Countless studies have shown that other countries' ATC systems are better-managed, better-funded, and better-supplied with advanced technology," Robert Poole, the Reason Foundation's director of transportation policy, points out. So archaic are air traffic control operations in the United States, he notes, that controllers in US airport towers "still use paper flight strips to follow departing flights instead of having electronic handoffs."

Not much has changed since Clinton lamented in 1995 that the FAA's "air traffic control system in many places still depends upon Stone Age technology that's often older than the flight controllers using it." This past June, FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee that ATC operations still rely on floppy disks and computers running Windows 95.

Our neighbor to the north long ago made the leap to nongovernmental air traffic control. In 1996, Canada created Nav Canada, a not-for-profit corporation that is fully funded by users of the system — that is, airlines and other aircraft operators — and thus doesn't cost taxpayers a cent. The results have been almost uniformly positive. Nav Canada funds its own modernization and operates on a solid financial footing. The company has hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve — a stark contrast to the FAA's perennial shortfalls.

Canada boasts state-of-the-art satellite navigation systems. Almost 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal's aviation columnist, Scott McCartney, marveled at how flying south from Canada to the United States was "like time travel for pilots ... you leave a modern air-traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up."

In Canadian ATC towers, there are no strips of paper to shuffle. Instead, controllers update information about each flight on touch screens and pass the information to one another electronically. "Requests for altitude changes are automatically checked for conflicts before they even pop up on controllers' screens," McCartney wrote. "Computers look 20 minutes ahead for any planes potentially getting too close to each other. Flights are monitored by a system more accurate than radar, allowing them to be safely spaced closer together to add capacity and reduce delays."

The FAA, meanwhile, has been working on upgrading its technology for more than 20 years, but its efforts, as the trade group Airlines for America testified at a Senate hearing in 2019, "have been plagued by significant cost overruns, delays, and lack of benefits to users of the system." Even with the best of intentions, the FAA's insulation from market feedback ensures that every budget cycle, political skirmish, and procurement whim will affect the pace at which it modernizes. Without direct accountability to those who pay for and rely on its services, there is neither urgency to cut costs nor a penalty for slipping timelines — so projects balloon, roll out late, or simply stall in a maze of red tape.

America's antiquated air traffic control system is both embarrassing and unnecessary. The wheel doesn't need to be reinvented. In 2017, legislation to privatize ATC operations along the lines of the Canadian model passed the House Transportation Committee. It had the support of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers' labor union, and was strongly endorsed by President Trump, who was then in his first term. At the time, alas, the bill went no farther.

This would be a fine time to revive that legislation. Is it naive to imagine that fixing air traffic control is one way to "make America great again" that doesn't have to involve polarizing rhetoric or angry culture wars? The formula is clear: Carve air traffic control out of the FAA, move it to an independent, user-funded corporation, and let market needs — not politics — dictate priorities. Under such a "separation of ATC and state," safety oversight would remain with the FAA, but the era of paper strips and floppy disks would finally end.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

(COMMENT, BELOW)