Air traffic control privatization is just an airline power grab

For millions of Americans, the upcoming holidays mean flying home, often to a small town served by a small airport. While Americans make their holiday plans, what they may not know is that the big airlines are demanding Congress pass a bill that would likely threaten needed upgrades at airports in small towns and communities across the country.

The airlines seek, in the form of legislation known as H.R. 2997, to essentially wrest control of the nation’s air traffic control (ATC) system from Congress, and put it in their own hands. This power grab has been peddled as privatization or modernization, but it really amounts to a giveaway to a board of special interests.

Under this bill, no one would compete to run the ATC system. Instead, it would be stripped away from the FAA, and handed over, for free, to a small, private, unaccountable board. That board would be dominated by the airlines and their allies.

If the airlines run the nation’s aviation system, there’s good reason to worry that small communities across America would be left behind. Of the country’s more than 5,000 public-use airports, only about 500 are served by the airlines. And that service is shrinking. The same airlines that claim the ATC system would be better in their hands have cut service to small towns and rural communities by over 20 percent in recent years.

The thousands of communities across America without airline service rely on smaller public-use airports, and the mostly small general aviation airplanes that fly in and out of them. These small airports support cargo and shipping, business travel, flight schools, life-saving air ambulances, transport of vital and timely organ donations, transport of food, water, and medical supplies during disaster-relief efforts, and a host other civil and humanitarian services.