With user fees always seeming to be on the horizon for General Aviation, the topic often comes up of who really should be paying for Air Traffic Control services. With EAA being forced to foot the ATC bill for Oshkosh last year and the Copper State Fly-in electing to operate without a tower, the issue has never been more top of mind for General Aviation flyers.
Mac McClellan wrote in his blog about maybe it is the time to privatize ATC. So the question remains, should the free market be allowed to work and Air Traffic Control be privatized? What if there was a middle ground. Taking into account the fact that in Canada ATC is a service for which you will be charged, what if in the USA instead of all flights being charged only IFR flights would be charged. VFR flights would not be charged for ATC services because they are not using ATC heavily and it would create an incentive for VFR pilots to check-in. After all ATC would rather have all the traffic in the area on their radar. Below is a link for another article on commercializing ATC services.
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation/airports-atc#5
Comments
Post a Comment