On Monday evening, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control Command Center sent out an emergency notice that Hollywood Burbank Airport had zero air traffic controllers on duty. That’s how the nation’s airlines learned that no controllers had shown up for the evening shift at Burbank tower.
The controllers had all called in sick due to the federal government shutdown that began last week. During the shutdown, air traffic controllers are not being paid for their often six-day, 10-hours-per-day work weeks. While President Donald Trump has floated the idea of not paying all federal workers back pay this time, controllers have typically received back pay for time worked during shutdowns.
All evening long, flight arrivals and departures at Burbank were delayed, as the FAA’s regional TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) facility took over for the local tower and handled the reduced traffic into Burbank. Outgoing flights from Burbank were delayed an average of two and a half hours.
Air traffic controller staffing shortages were also slowing flights at airports in Las Vegas, Denver, and Newark, among others.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that this did not have to happen and can be prevented from happening again.
In fact, this kind of situation can’t occur in nearly 100 other countries around the world, because those countries fund air traffic control, much like airports, from customer user fees and long-term revenue bond financing.
By contrast, the FAA, which includes the country’s Air Traffic Organization, is mostly funded by federal aviation user taxes. Because they are taxes, the money goes to the federal government, and Congress must appropriate the funds for FAA and the Air Traffic Organization. When Congress fails to pass budgets and shuts down the federal government, even though airline passengers continue to pay their ticket taxes, the money does not reach controllers or the air traffic system. This system is also a significant reason why American air traffic control technology is outdated and lags behind that of large air traffic control systems in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and others.
In 1987, New Zealand separated its air traffic control provider from the government, which enabled its new Airways Corporation to retain the revenue from the user fees paid by the airlines, just like electric and water utilities charge their customers. The success of Airways New Zealand led to dozens of countries doing likewise within a decade. Today, nearly 100 countries receive their air traffic control services from air navigation service providers, which are funded directly by user fees paid by airlines and business jets.
With their own revenue source, these air navigation service providers are unaffected by government shutdowns. They are also better able to fund long-term projects and technological improvements because they aren’t beholden to the dysfunctional political battles in Congress that determine aviation funding every few years.
The New Zealand success inspired Bill Clinton’s presidential administration to study and then recommend creating a U.S. counterpart, which was detailed in a large-scale study by the office of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Unfortunately, opposition by private pilot groups killed it.
Those ideas were revisited after the 16-day shutdown in 2013 caused air traffic control problems and closed the academy that trains new controllers. That shutdown prompted the National Air Traffic Controllers Association to support efforts to transfer the nation’s air traffic control system from the FAA to a self-supporting nonprofit corporation.
This effort was championed by then-Rep. Bill Shuster, who chaired a House transportation committee that twice passed the reforms. President Donald Trump endorsed that plan during his first term, but the administration didn’t push it, and the bill never even made it to the House floor.
Today, the primary opponents are members of Congress who don’t want to lose control over the system and the business jet community, which doesn’t want to pay user fees. But it is still possible to take air traffic control out of the federal budget, insulating it from recurrent government shutdowns.
It’s time for the U.S. to join the rest of the world in recognizing that governments should regulate safety but not run air traffic control, which is a high-tech business that should be directly funded by fee-paying airlines and operated like a public utility or nonprofit corporation.
Robert Poole is director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, where he has advised multiple presidential administrations on air traffic control.