DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

Dear Mr. President: It is my understanding that you wish to improve the infrastructure of our great Country and your first goal is to tackle Aviation. I am sorry to see that you have incompetent people advising you on this topic. You state that you want to privatize Air Traffic Control (ATC), which has nothing to do with the infrastructure of aviation. ATC’s goal is to move traffic with efficiency and do it safely. It has nothing to do with infrastructure. It is my understanding that our ATC system moves more traffic in one day than does the rest of the world combined. Flying for over 50 years I would have to say ATC does an excellent job of moving traffic safely from point A to B. ATC is not a horrible horrible system as you have been quoted. Matter of fact we have the safest ATC system in the world. You state that ATC is responsible for all delays in the system and that traffic is circling over our airports to land. This is not true. No airplanes are circling over airports in a holding pattern to land. One major problem of delays in this country is that the airlines use primarily the same 38 airports, and they all want to take off and land at these airports at the exact same time. Even with ADS-B and NextGen coming on line in 2020, this problem will not be resolved. Yes airplanes will be allowed to fly direct to certain airports instead of following a highway in the sky, but since they all want to arrive at the same time holdings and delays in the air will increase over what we have today. There are several types of holdings that occur today: ground stoppages due to weather at destinations where planes are not allowed to take off; holding at various points in route because there are just too many planes wanting to land at the same airport at the same time and increased spacing for landings due to inclement weather. You state that you want to do away with fuel taxes collected and paid at time of fuel production and institute user fees. It will cost more to collect user fees than our current system and this will lead to a new bureaucracy just to collect these fees. The airlines will just pass this increased fee onto the end user, the passenger. General aviation will come to a screeching halt as those flying for small business and pleasure will not be able to afford these fees. And speaking of privatization how is that working for the Post Office who continues to bleed more looses each year. We have an excellent system for ATC that works in this Country. Unfortunately it is the balance of the FAA that needs to be disbanded and started anew. Congress has not been of much assistance in continually financing the FAA throughout the years. There has been no continuity of budget. When the FAA decides to bring a new program onboard it is so bogged down politically that it is antiquated when it comes to fruition. So in my opinion everything that you have stated about the ATC system is fake news and has been handled badly. Hopefully you can surround yourself with more informed people on this issue that show more knowledge of the system and are not sleeping with Airline lobbyist.

BASICMED

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