KEEPING THE SKIES UNFRIENDLY: The Corporate Jet Set’s War on Coach Passengers. The federal government’s air-traffic control system is so awful that even the unionized controllers want to turn it over to a not-for-profit corporation, as Republican leaders in Congress hope to do this month. They’ve got a good chance of succeeding in the House, but prospects are uncertain in the Senate. My piece in City Journal:

Members of Congress are about to face a tough choice: should they vote to replace America’s scandalously antiquated air-traffic control system with one that would be safer and cheaper, reduce the federal deficit, conserve fuel, ease congestion in the skies, and speed travel for tens of millions of airline passengers? Or should they maintain the status quo to please the lobbyists representing owners of corporate jets?

If that choice doesn’t sound difficult, then you don’t know the power that corporate jet-setters wield in Congress. They’re the consummate Washington crony capitalists: shameless enough to demand that their private flights be subsidized by the masses who fly coach, savvy enough to stymie reforms backed by Democratic and Republican administrations.

If they prevail, we’ll be stuck with an air-traffic system mired in mid-twentieth  century technology:

Controllers and pilots rely on ground-based radar and radio beacons instead of GPS satellites. They communicate by voice over crowded radio channels because the federal government still hasn’t figured out how to use text messaging. The computers in control towers are so primitive that controllers track planes by passing around slips of paper.

The result: an enormous amount of time wasted by passengers, especially those traveling in the busy airspace of the Northeast. Because the system is so imprecise, planes have to be kept far apart, which limits the number of planes in the air—leaving passengers stranded at terminals listening to the dread announcements about “air traffic delays.” When they do finally take off, they’re often delayed further because the pilot must fly a zig-zag course following radio beacons instead of saving time and fuel by taking a direct route.

Reformers have been trying to fix the system for decades, but the lobbyists for the Gulfstream class like it just the way it is.