While Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) finally found the support he needed to get his FAA reauthorization bill, the 21st Century AIRR Act, passed by the House’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, for which he serves as chairman, it has still been met with a great deal of opposition within the aviation world. In fact, on Tuesday, it was revealed that the House vote on H.R.2997 has been delayed, but it does not mean that the effort to privatize air traffic control is dead.
At least 120 aviation groups added their names to a joint statement opposing the AIRR Act, and specifically ATC privatization. Even as Rep. Sam Graves, a pilot, has switched his stance from last year and asked his colleagues in the GA caucus to pass this bill, lawmakers have spoken out against the plan to hand air traffic control over to a nonprofit corporate entity.
Rep. Steve Russell (R-OK) took to the House floor last Friday to explain why he's against H.R.2997 and, perhaps sensing the need to draw more public attention to the cause, he invoked one the biggest names in aviation: Capt. C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger. The aviation safety expert and pilot-in-command during the "Miracle on the Hudson" recently spoke to Katie Couric about why he is opposing the AIRR Act and ATC privatization. Russell quoted a key excerpt from that interview during his speech:
Sullenberger claimed that what is really going on is a “political budget problem,” and ATC privatization is the “extreme solution” that allows “… stakeholders, basically controlled by the largest airlines, to control access to and pricing of access to the air traffic control system.”
One of the compromises that Shuster made in amending his failed 2016 bill, according to Graves, was a guarantee that "no user fees were levied on any segment of general aviation." However, aviation groups still maintain that privatizing ATC will cost billions in transition, when that money could be much better spent improving the current system and leaving it in the control of the FAA. "A privatized ATC would be inherently 'too-big-to fail,' resulting in taxpayer bailouts just as we've seen in Canada and the U.K.," AOPA president Mark Baker said last week.
Yet even as the Senate's competing FAA Reauthorization Bill has garnered support from the same groups that oppose the AIRR Act, Sullenberger is still worried about the ongoing effort to make ATC privatization a reality.
“I’m worried about access. I’m worried about equitability. I’m worried about safety,” he told Couric. “There are other, better ways to solve this political budget problem — by giving the FAA, in running the air traffic control system and making capital improvements to the air traffic control system, more predictable multi-year funding — without giving away the keys to the kingdom to the largest airlines to control access and fees and pricing too.”
