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Other countries have restructured their air traffic control ( systems as self-supporting entities outside of their government bureaucracies
By Chris Edwards of Cato.
"Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Germany appear to be doing a better job
than America at embracing new technologies for air traffic control
(ATC). Those countries have restructured their ATC systems as
self-supporting entities outside of their government bureaucracies while
we still run ours as part of the civil service in the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA).
More evidence that Congress should restructure our ATC system comes from today’s Wall Street Journal:
An effort to modernize the U.S. air-traffic-control
system is seeing such a bumpy rollout that costs associated with some of
the core technology outweigh potential benefits, according to a report
soon to be released by a federal watchdog.
An audit report by the Transportation Department’s inspector general,
slated to be released in the next few days, raises new questions about
the design, deployment and projected benefits of one of the Federal
Aviation Administration’s futuristic ways to enhance monitoring and
management of aircraft.
The document is sharply critical about early implementation of
ground-based radio towers that are part of a proposed $4.5 billion
network designed to track the locations of planes more precisely than
current radar. The new system, dubbed ADS-B, eventually aims to rely
primarily on satellite-based navigation and tracking.
Some of the general criticism mirrors reports and comments by the
inspector general and his staff over the past few years directed at the
FAA’s overall air-traffic-modernization initiative, which it calls
NextGen.
The federal bureaucracy would not be very good at running a high-tech
firm, such as Apple, so it is no surprise that FAA has major problems
running the high-tech ATC business. Our ATC system needs better
management, higher efficiency, and more rapid innovation. We are more
likely to achieve those goals if we privatized the system, as Canada did successfully almost two decades ago."
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