President's Perspective

FAA tax increases not so trivial

If your flight training were to cost you $5 more an hour than it does now, would that affect you? Would you think twice about getting your student pilot certificate if it cost you $42 for the certificate itself--in addition to the medical examiner's fee? Would paying $5 every time you flew in Class B airspace change the course of your training? Those are just some of the proposed costs in the new FAA funding bill now before Congress.

FAA Administrator Marion Blakey thinks these are trivial amounts. In fact, she even made light of them in a recent speech, calling the cost increases "less than a Starbucks latte."

It's easy to be cavalier about money when you work in Washington, D.C. Government agencies--including the FAA--can waste millions of dollars, in the same way you could lose small change if coins slipped through a hole in your pocket. It may be very small change to them, but I understand what even a few dollars means when you're struggling to learn to fly, pay your bills, and raise your family on an average American's salary. I was there once myself, financing my flight training on my credit cards, trying to keep my flying hours up and keep up with my bills.

The administration's proposed tax increases and user fees are not trivial matters. Many of you have already told AOPA that increasing the aviation gasoline tax nearly four-fold--to 70 cents per gallon--would have a huge negative impact on your flying. And as the president of both AOPA and the International Association of Aircraft Owner and Pilot Associations (IAOPA), I have seen firsthand how tax increases and user fees have destroyed general aviation in other parts of the world.

I've written before about the danger of changing the FAA funding mechanism (see "President's Perspective: The Danger of User Fees," March 2007 AOPA Flight Training). Then it was a threat, because we didn't know exactly what the administration was going to do. Now there's a bill--the Next Generation Air Transportation System Financing Reform Act of 2007--and the threat has become reality.

If the bill passes, you will pay more, but the airlines (or, more correctly, airline passengers) would pay less--about $2 billion a year less. Understandably, the airlines find a lot to like in this bill. Both the airlines and the FAA would like to knock Congress out of the loop. Today our lawmakers--with considerable input from constituents like you--decide how much aviation taxes will be, and how much the FAA will spend. This "financing reform" bill puts those decisions in the hands of bureaucrats and an airline-dominated board. And there would be no appeals outside of the Department of Transportation. The bill cuts both Congress and the courts out of the process.

It's not like the FAA needs the money. In fact, the agency's bill would generate less money than the current funding system of excise taxes on aviation fuel and airline passenger tickets. Nor is it about "fairness," as both the FAA and the airlines try to argue. They claim that the airlines pay for more of the air traffic control system than they use, but that's only because the FAA used a simplistic formula to divide up the costs.

The entire ATC system was created to meet the demands of the airlines' "feast or famine" hub-and-spoke scheduling system. Think of it this way: You walk into the only restaurant in town because you need to eat. You don't use the parking valet or the coat check. You sit down at the only table available, which has all the place settings for a seven-course meal. You order just a hamburger; the high-roller sharing your table gets the full-course lobster Thermador dinner with all the trimmings. Then he says you and he should split the bill because, after all, you both ate dinner and used the same facility.

I don't think so.

Fortunately, many of our friends in Congress don't buy it either. But while many parts of the administration's FAA funding bill were "dead on arrival" when they landed on Congress' doorstep, there is still the risk that what legislation emerges could be harmful to general aviation.

You have a stake--a big stake--in all of this. That's why it is so important that you be ready to respond in case AOPA needs your help. Make sure we have your e-mail address so that we can contact you quickly if the time comes. And please answer the call. The future of general aviation could very well depend on it. Visit AOPA Online often to stay fully informed.