The Airline Perspective

摘要

While we are only at the opening stages of what surely will be a robust debate on how to "fix" the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, it is not too early to identify the drawbacks of the current scheme and to begin discussing fundamental principles on which to build potential solutions. The airlines have a direct interest in this debate, because we provide well over ninety percent of the revenue for the Trust Fund. Whatever sense this level of support may have made when the Fund was first established, it is no longer true today. Why? Because scheduled commercial operations today account for only about two-thirds of the controlled flight operations handled by the ATC system. And we pay more: once in the form of taxes and fees, and again in delay costs, because the Trust Fund has not produced the necessary system capacity, efficiency, and modernization.