Stossel: privatize ATC
 

Stossel is rarely wrong.
He’s right here, too.

I have a nasty case of Gell-Mann amnesia coming on; I'll have to go lay down.

The flights were delayed! The computer system has issues and crashes, so let's do everything with a...computer system/remote controllers like Europe! Haha. Sorry John, yeah, FAA is behind, but it's not the 1960s. NextGen is happening, paper strips are for ya know, when those computer systems act up. Privatizing the NAS will kill GA. AOPA, EAA, and others have been fighting this for years as they should. Like Stossel, but wholeheartedly disagree here.

I used to like John.

That's the real problem. The rest of the industry relies on GA as a foundation, to one degree or another.

I could write a paragraph listing all of the things which are fundamentaly wrong with government, and always will be, but some functions in society lend themselves best to government, not private, regulation. Law enforcement (including prisons), national defense, nuclear regulatory, and ATC are examples of functions which .gov needs to retain.

Privatization of infrastructure has yielded mixed results in this country over the years. Most of us pay some private entity for our utilities, but those utilities are regulated and monitored by the government in some pretty big ways. Private services we do buy still rely upon and take up resources of other, govt infratructure. (SpaceX and their use of govermnet launch, tracking, etc. comes to mind.). So government isn't coming out of infrastructure even if change takes place.

I'll submit that the solution is to address how acquisition and development programs combine with career management become never-ending, low-productivity, disasters. 100LL replacement, NextGenATC, RealID, etc. all start to seem a lot like the SLS, Zumwalt Class Destroyer, etc. Unless we find a way to detoxify promotion, selection and acquisition, we are going to see different flavors of failure. Ultimately this means someone's boss is going to be embarrassed. That's a risk you can get a few individuals to take, but not in the numbers required to change an institution.

Expect scant improvement. Look at how far behind we are just with CPDLC.

You might want to spend some time jacked in on station with a controller. I did that a few weeks ago at MSP center. Right up front, I saw Stossel making claims that were straight up wrong:
- Flights are tracked by computer systems; the paper strips do exist but only as a backup.
- A number of NextGen technologies are already here: ADS-B is one, CPDLC is another

I had to turn it off after that. I side with him on lots of issues, but on this one it seems pretty clear he didn't bother to verify a couple of basic items and if he didn't do that, the rest of his piece is specious at best.

The Soviet Union?!?!
 

What an idiot.. Typical Stossel.. Company good, Union bad, government regulation bad.

I guess that he doesn’t realize that the Soviet Union had a Going Out of business sale 32 years ago, LOL! He makes no mention on the terrible effect that this would have on anything that wasn’t Part 121 flying. Because of privatization elsewhere, America is the flight training capitol of the world.

Why will it kill GA, AOPA, EAA etc.etc.?

The USA is real close to having their own going out of business sale. This is why we should privatize as much as possible and as fast as possible.

I think it's been over five years ago I flew over Burma and even back then they had CPDLC. The sad part is we probably paid for it.