The proposed budget by House Republicans would cut the FAA’s operations by $1.4 billion. It’s not clear that Congress has learned anything from past mistakes. ![]() And now here we are 10 years later, almost to the date and we’re looking at the same type of draconian cuts.” “And when you look at our short staffing now,” Rinaldi continues, “we have never made it back up since sequestration. They looked at closing and cutting more than 100 federal contract towers, and stopped most modernization projects.” “They closed the air traffic control academy,” he explains “They looked at reducing hours and many air traffic facilities. The current shortage of air traffic controllers is hardly new-it can be traced back to the 2013 United States budget sequestration, says Rinaldi. When a passenger buys an airline ticket, the price includes aviation-related excise taxes that go into the trust fund, he explains, “which could fund the ATO to the point that the FAA wouldn’t have to interrupt modernization projects while hiring and it would have some financial stability.” should fund the ATO through a tax-funded program we already have called the Aviation Trust Fund, which was established in 1970. This separation is already in place in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and most other countries, and it is the longstanding recommendation of the International Civil Aviation Organization. should pull the Air Traffic Organization (ATO), the agency’s operational air navigation arm, out of the FAA, which is also responsible for regulatory oversight. On JetBlue’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Robin Hayes noted the “very challenging backdrop” and said the FAA’s request for 10% voluntary reductions by carriers “creates a significant headwind for the American travelers flying this summer.”įew people understand the challenges of air traffic control better than Paul Rinaldi, a former 16-year air traffic controller at Washington Dulles International Airport and 12-year president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). The New York-based carrier posted a loss for the first quarter of the year and its $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines is being challenged by the Department of Justice. airports this summer, reducing the number of available flights.ĭelays in two major markets can easily create a ripple effect nationwide, but the issue is of particular concern to airlines like JetBlue with strongholds in the Northeast. Travel Cassandras were quick to recognize a bad omen when the FAA asked airlines to pull back slots in New York and Washington, D.C. “These problems have been driven by a slate of missed opportunities over the years from Congress and within the federal government.”Īnother salient challenge is the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. “Aviation infrastructure and technology have been chronically underfunded for years,” says Freeman. Of the agency’s 2023 annual budget of $23.6 billion, $1 billion is earmarked for NextGen. Since then, the FAA has been ramping up its ambitious, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort, known as NextGen, to modernize the system. The issue was fully exposed in January when an outage of one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s critical systems led to a nationwide ground stop of all flights for several hours. ![]() Flash forward one year and many of those same problems still exist.įirst, the United States has been woefully slow to update its aging aviation infrastructure. While many of those flight disruptions were blamed on airlines’ supply-chain issues and pilot shortages, the meltdown also exposed cracks in the country’s aviation infrastructure and staffing deficiencies. Tens of thousands of flights were delayed and cancelled, travelers were left stranded, countless pieces of baggage were lost, and an aging and outdated infrastructure creaked and strained under the stress of it all. ![]() After the aviation industry ground to a virtual halt during the pandemic, it could not ramp up fast enough to handle the massive post-pandemic crush of people finally traveling again. It’s virtually impossible to overstate the Air-mageddon of Summer 2022.
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