How the FAA’s Failure Delayed Thousands of Flights on Wednesday

TOUSANDS of flights were delayed Wednesday morning, and hundreds were canceled due to the latest air travel headache.

What has happened?

Well, this time it wasn’t an airline to blame, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government agency that provides air traffic control services in the US. It happened. reportedly After an outage in its Notice to Air Missions system, which provides important information updates to pilots, the FAA grounded all flights. Mistakes happen, but the FAA is catching heat because its technology is outdated and it hasn’t modernized its systems, making it more susceptible to this kind of problem.

What else could you expect from a government-monopoly on a particular service?

As National Review’s Dominic Pino explains, “The FAA is both the industry’s safety regulator and the provider of air-traffic-control services. But there is no reason for the FAA to do both of those tasks. It should instead continue to regulate safety while its air-traffic-control responsibilities are handed off to the private sector.”

We could have efficient, privatized air traffic control. Canada—yes, Canada—actually has a privatized system. Pino Recaps:

“Canada has proven that private air-traffic control is also sound in practice. In 1996, under a Liberal government, Canada privatized its air-traffic-control system, creating a nonprofit corporation called Nav Canada that is fully funded by users of the system and thus doesn’t cost taxpayers a cent. Looking back over its first 20 years of operations, Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation found in 2016 that Nav Canada had succeeded in just about every respect: Safety was improved, technology was modernized quickly, and costs were reduced.”

Many policy experts believe that the US should be privatized.

“Since Canada moved to a privatized ATC system, it has been able to modernize its air traffic technology faster than the United States,” The American Action Forum reported It is also notable that 2017 has seen lower flight hour costs.

They note, however, that the following are some of their other observations. “removing air traffic control from governmental constraints has allowed other countries to modernize their technologies at rates faster than the United States, while maintaining a safe system with lower costs.”

Perhaps we should look into this alternative system. We can continue to see delays and greater incompetence from government bureaucrats. It’s our choice, America.

Do you like this article? The latest BASEDPolitics podcast is available here Apple Podcasts, SpotifyOr below: