On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:33:04 -0700, Matt Barrow wrote:

You don't think those links are written by someone with a vested
interest or bias of some sort?

What in\terest would that be?

I've no idea. I don't care enough to learn. Willful distortion, though,
makes it clear that there's something motivating the authors away from
truth.


Why else would the first article start with citing the problem of
congested airports but call that an ATC issue? That's misdirection;
simple literary dishonesty.

Maybe the fact there's no fees for landing during peak timeslots has
something to do with that? Maybe if you dig a bit you find that's a mjor
tenent of his proposal?

That's fine. And if he were to use that argument to push for something
like congestion pricing for landing slots, I'd have no problem with the
logic. That's not where that paper took the reasoning, however.


The second simply says essentially "there's evidence that we're right"
w/o citing any.

Could you poin that one out?

Point out a lack of citation?

But I should have been more precise: I was referring specifically to the
claim that the lack of funding is an obstacle to ATC upgrading. The
closest thing to a citation is the claim that Blakey and Mineta have
claimed that the FAA's funding base has been "devastated". Evidence from
testimony suggests otherwise.


The third speaks to a funding problem. Yet the GAO disagrees,
according to testimony by Gerald Dillingham. Calvin Scovel of the DOT
agrees with that testimony.

[...]

It's worth reading GAO-06-1114T itself. For example, I note on page 12
that the FAA is apparently ignoring the fact that - regardless of the
services GA receives from the ATC system - the system as it exists today
exists because of commercial aviation. Did commercial aviation not exist,
the cost of GA's consumed services would be quite a bit lower.

It's easy to distort the truth as the FAA is apparently doing, simply by
speaking of that "cost of services received". It's quite similar, in
fact, to a game being played out in my local township. To fudge some
numbers, the town is pushing some services (ie. parking and sewage) onto
separate agencies. The agencies hire additional people (that weren't
needed when the town provided these services directly), and then call
these hires "costs of running the agency" that get passed on to the users.

Perhaps there are spreadsheets that can justify the cost given that the
agencies exist, but the agencies were imposed upon the users. It was a
constituent other than the users that caused this addition cost, even
those the users are getting parking and sewage services.

Put another way, the users could (and did) get those same services at
lower cost but for the decisions made for someone else's benefit. Why
should the users shoulder the additional cost?

The report does touch upon this issue again - not merely citing FAA
claims, but actually pointing them out - on pages 14 and 15.

Another issue raised by this report is equity. An example cited is that
a 767 flight contributes more than a 737 flight. From the FAA's
perspective, I see the issue. But ATC service cost is just one possible
metric for a given flight. Another is the value provided by that flight.
Assuming that there's some value in getting a person from point A to point
B, then that 767 flight does contribute more value as well. A VAT on that
value would yield more than on a 737 flight.

On a lighter note (at least I hope the authors saw the humor here; I sure
do), page 16 speaks to the "problem" that a fuel tax might encourage fuel
efficiency.

All that said, there's something I've missed. Where in that report is the
claim that the FAA will be underfunded by the current system of fuel taxes?

What that ignores is structural
changes in air transportation, discussed in last fall's GAO report on
the same subject (its) and in FAA's justification for its funding reform
proposal. A fundamental disconnect exists between the drivers of
aviation tax revenue (the number of passengers carried and the average
ticket price) and the ATC system's annual cost (driven by workload,
based on the growth in air traffic). As the same total number of people
gets carried in more, smaller units (RJs instead of 737s, air taxis and
fractionals instead of airliners, etc.), traffic grows faster than
passengers, and therefore costs grow faster than revenue. It is this
structural disconnect that threatens the ability to afford NextGen.

This ignores numerous issues, and the cited GAO report makes nothing like
this strong a claim. For example, air taxis are likely to avoid the
terminal areas most congested. The same is true, albeit presumably to a
reduced degree, for any increase in RJ traffic. This pushes traffic from
the more congested areas to the less congested areas.

[...]

More, the fact that the airlines are apparently able to exploit this
process to try to achieve yet another tax break (despite the claimed
issue being an FAA cash shortfall) makes it clear that the process is
biased and therefore flawed (and pretty much congressional business as
usual).

It's the airlines funding model that he explicitly rejects.

I'm not sure what you mean. Did you mean "airlines' funding..."? And to
which "he" are you referring? The author of those four papers? Or one of
the Senators from the origins of this thread.

The latter is to what I was referring in my paragraph above. The process
in the Senate we're witnessing is corrupted (though in the fashion to
which we've become accustomed). That paragraph wasn't addressing those
four papers, but the process which threatens to impose these fees upon us
[merely because some Senator has a donation up his ... wallet].

- Andrew