More than 60 countries have turned their air-traffic control over to self-funding entities

See Can Pete Buttigieg Fix the FAA? by Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"it’s been a 30-year-event, starting when Vice President Al Gore, leader of the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” initiative, valiantly tried and failed to remove air-traffic control from the federal bureaucracy and its pork-barreling congressional overseers.

By now, more than 60 countries have taken Mr. Gore’s 1993 advice, turning their air-traffic control over to self-funding entities. If the U.S. had done the same, it might have an ATC system of the 1990s, 2000s, possibly even the 2010s—instead of one from the 1980s.

Inept salesmen have called the process corporatization but it simply means handing controllers, radars and facilities over to a nonprofit that would charge cost-based fees to users of the nation’s controlled airspace. Such an outfit would be free to float bonds in its own name to install 21st-century technology while the 21st century is still in progress.

Taking advantage of decades-old advances in computers, networking and satellite navigation, the long-promised era of “free flight” would finally be inaugurated. Planes could fly more direct paths between origin and destination. Tighter, more accurate spacing would effectively increase airport capacity, reducing ground delays."