As the Trump administration presses a plan to privatize the nation's air traffic control system, general aviation advocates are warning the proposal could all but decimate Florida's flight training industry and, in turn, exacerbate a growing airline pilot shortage.

  • Trump administration, House GOP wants to privatize air traffic control
  • Non-profit board of directors dominated by airline executives
  • Aviation leaders call for modernizing, not privatizing

The White House proposal is included in legislation recently filed by House Republicans and would shift the management of air traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration to a non-profit board of directors. The board would be empowered to overhaul air traffic control processes, with an eye toward addressing the systemic delays plaguing the airline industry.

"Our plan will get you where you need to go more quickly, more reliably, more affordably and, yes, for the first time in a long time, on time," President Trump said in introducing the plan in June.

Because the board would be dominated by airline executives, however, it could be predisposed to implement airline-friendly policies, such as charging general aviation pilots air traffic control user fees. That, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association President Mark Baker warns, would have the effect of discouraging the commerce and flight training operations that are critical parts of local economies.

"The ecosystem that we have in transportation, which includes airspace, air traffic, 5,000 public use airports, which keep jobs happening in rural America, bringing products to market, wouldn't happen -- 'cause it doesn't happen anywhere else in the world -- with a privatized system," Baker said.

Baker joined the leaders of three other aviation organizations -- the National Business Aviation Association, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association and the Experimental Aircraft Association -- for an anti-privatization rally at EAA's AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, WI, last month.

The rally's tagline -- 'modernize, not privatize' -- underscored the groups' demands for Congress to pass multi-year FAA budgets that would allow the agency to take a long-term approach to improving the air traffic control system.

Sun 'n Fun President John 'Lites' Leenhouts came to Oshkosh, too, both to promote the Polk County flight training scholarship organization's annual airshow and to stand in solidarity against privatization. If user fees were to be implemented, he predicted Florida's mammoth flight training industry - second only to California's - could be hit especially hard, with prospective students deciding a career in aviation isn't worth the cost of training.

"If you charge those rates to operate out of an airfield and in the sky to learn to fly, the cost to learn, which is already expensive, goes up exponentially," Leenhouts said. "That then precludes the potential new aviator from going into the business."

Critics of the privatization proposal also argue that airline delays rarely owe to inefficiencies in the air traffic control system. Instead, most delays are caused by overcrowded hubs, maintenance issues and weather.

If anything, Leenhouts said, privatization could increase delays if it causes the pilot shortage - which Boeing estimates has grown to 637,000 over the next two decades - to get even worse. By discouraging flight training, user fees could leave airlines with lots of airplanes but not enough pilots to fly them.

"Guess who's going to pay for it?" Leenhouts asked. "You and I that get into our general aviation aircraft and call a controller and take off out of an airfield and land somewhere else. We're paying the price for them to talk to us, and right now if we do that it'll kill what is already a really challenging career field."

Privatization proponents point out that user fees aren't part of the current proposal, which maintains the use of the aviation fuel tax as the principal means of funding air traffic control.

Simply shifting to a privatized system, though, could come at a steep cost to taxpayers. Last week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the current legislation would increase the federal budget deficit by $98.5 billion over ten years, up from an initial projection of $20.7 billion.