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The FAA Meltdown Proves It’s Time to Finally Fix Air Travel - The New York Times [1]

['William J. Mcgee']

Date: 2023-01-13

By midsummer, airlines had canceled or delayed more than 100,000 passenger flights in 2022, for which, in many cases, they had sold tickets despite knowing they would be unable to staff them. This was a result of early retirement incentives offered by the airlines during Covid; despite a taxpayer bailout of $54 billion, the airlines sought to limit labor costs to favor investment compensation even though they were nearly insolvent.

The airlines have no spare capacity, and passenger loads are at record highs, which means that one failure will cascade across the system. Despite having the authority to investigate and fine airlines for unfair and deceptive practices, the Department of Transportation and its subsidiary the F.A.A. have deferred to the private sector for decades, and have done little to rearrange market incentives that lead to these problems.

Our existing political and regulatory system around the airlines likewise does not provide many pathways for addressing these problems. The airlines are not a consistently profitable industry, shown by their need to come hat-in-hand for a bailout at any sign of economic turbulence. Yet it is to the airlines and their executives we often defer for solutions.

The private sector is a core part of the dysfunction. Airlines for America, the industry’s main lobbying group, has consistently stated it supports NextGen in principle but has frequently lobbied against it, arguing it would require investments in upgrading equipment on aircraft. Airlines have been lobbying against the upgrades to F.A.A. satellite-based systems, often wanting to avoid making the capital investments in aircraft that comply with the new system.

Many on the right and in the industry will call for the privatization of the F.A.A. as a result of this outage. But that doesn’t get at the problems we’ve seen in the private sector that are similar, and in many cases, worse. In both the airline industry and the regulators overseeing it, we jump from crisis to crisis without solving any underlying problems. Last summer’s mass cancellations, the Southwest meltdown, numerous other airline I.T. outages, and now this F.A.A. outage show we need to rethink how we do air travel in the United States.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/opinion/faa-air-travel-regulation-outage.html

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