"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
online.com...
Does that matter? I'd think that "cost" would be measured in
controller-hours. Whether it is one controller for four hours or twently
controllers for twelve minutes each, the cost would be the same.

That might be true if it took an entire controller to handle a single
flight, and that entire controller spent 100% of his on-clock hours handling
the flight.

But that's not how it works.

As Marco says, you can probably fudge the numbers to say whatever you want,
since it involves hard-to-pin-down things like overhead of handoffs (airline
flights have many more handoffs than slow GA flights) and fractional time
spent handling the flight (I'd guess slower flights require less attention,
since it takes them longer for their general situation to change, but
someone arguing the other side would probably try to claim the opposite).

The bottom line is that most GA flights don't use ATC at all, and most of
the ones that do are generally just "kept out of the way" of the commercial
traffic. In addition, while airlines do pay a passenger tax, GA flights pay
much higher fuel taxes than do airlines. And they pay them whether they use
ATC services or not.

As a total proportion of operating expenses, I'd guess GA flights are
actually paying more, though I haven't bothered to calculate the difference.
Of course, in both cases, the costs are normally passed along to any
passengers; in the airlines' case, they get to pass the costs along 100%
while most GA flights do not (the pilot has to pay his share).

Of all the things worth space in an in-flight magazine, or in USA Today,
this ain't one of them. The aviation fee structure looks a lot like the
highway fee structure, and both seem to be working reasonably well, if you
ask me (and yes, I know you didn't ).

Pete