In Reach: A Win for Freedom and Safety

Jeff Jacoby's latest column asks, "Canada fixed its air traffic control decades ago. Why can't America?"

The rest might sound familiar: Government attempts to perform jobs outside its proper scope are sad jokes compared to those guided by the profit motive.

Or they would be jokes if they didn't involves the deaths and spectacular near-misses of America's air traffic control.

Jacoby does an able job of explaining the problem and contrasting our state-run system with those of other countries. Regarding the latter, Jacoby states in part:

Our neighbor to the north long ago made the leap to nongovernmental air traffic control. In 1996, Canada created Nav Canada, a not-for-profit corporation that is fully funded by users of the system -- that is, airlines and other aircraft operators -- and thus doesn't cost taxpayers a cent. The results have been almost uniformly positive. Nav Canada funds its own modernization and operates on a solid financial footing. The company has hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve -- a stark contrast to the FAA's perennial shortfalls.

Canada boasts state-of-the-art satellite navigation systems. Almost 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal's aviation columnist, Scott McCartney, marveled at how flying south from Canada to the United States was "like time travel for pilots ... you leave a modern air-traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up."

In Canadian ATC towers, there are no strips of paper to shuffle. Instead, controllers update information about each flight on touch screens and pass the information to one another electronically. "Requests for altitude changes are automatically checked for conflicts before they even pop up on controllers' screens," McCartney wrote. "Computers look 20 minutes ahead for any planes potentially getting too close to each other. Flights are monitored by a system more accurate than radar, allowing them to be safely spaced closer together to add capacity and reduce delays."

Take note that Canada's vastly superior system has been purring since 1996.

That's almost 30 years, and President Clinton proposed a similar change a little before that! In the meantime, about 80 countries have moved to this freer, safer approach to managing air travel.

Fortunately, Jacoby has good news: A similar legislative proposal passed the House during Trump's first term, but ultimately went nowhere.

He argues convincingly that the time has come for resurrecting the idea, and that it would be win-win for both parties and the President to get it over the line this time.

-- CAV