Privatizing air traffic control is a bad idea, especially for rural Americans.
Our nation’s airspace is a shared public resource that serves millions of passengers, businesses, and communities every day, an important component of the mobility Americans have come to rely upon for work, accessing medical care, connecting with family and friends, and more. Our air traffic control (ATC) system ensures safe and equitable access to this vital infrastructure. Despite its role as a necessary public good, proposals to privatize ATC have resurfaced several times since the election. Such action would undermine these values by placing this essential public service under the control of a private entity dominated by corporate interests. Instead, air traffic control should be kept public and under the oversight of Congress to ensure accountability to the public it serves.
Privatizing ATC would hand significant control of the airspace to the major airlines, allowing them to consolidate their power and dictate rules that prioritize their bottom lines over the public interest. In recent decades, airlines have consolidated to an oligopoly: Only four airlines control about 70 percent of domestic airline traffic, and about 70 percent of traffic goes through the 31 largest airports out of about 5,000 public-use airports in the national airspace system. For the airlines, hub-to-hub routes are the most profitable, and it makes sense that they would maximize these. But for many Americans, especially those in rural areas or farther from large cities, this trend makes it harder to access transportation and participate in the modern economy. Towns and small cities that lose access to airline service often struggle to retain businesses and jobs.
The importance of small regional airports was made particularly evident with recent natural and unnatural disasters. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recognizes about 3,300 airports as vital to national infrastructure. These airports play a critical role in emergency response, disaster relief, and economic development. Recent natural disasters, including the Los Angeles fires and Hurricane Helene, have underscored their importance. Even small airports without commercial service—like Santa Monica, Camarillo, Santa Ynez, Banning, and Whiteman in Southern California—provide crucial staging grounds for aerial firefighting, rapid refueling, and emergency coordination. Similarly, these small general aviation airports help deliver emergency aid when roads become impassable.
The framework of ATC public infrastructure, even in the landscape of airline consolidation, serves the public benefit by diversifying investment and ensuring viable regional airports, which tempers the exodus of airline service from smaller cities. If the airlines themselves are put in charge, they will shape the infrastructure to benefit them, not the consumer or the public. If the ATC system is structured around profitability for airlines, you can expect much more centralization of routes, further divestment in rural America, increasing inequities, and more businesses relocating to where they have access to more air travel options. And privatizing ATC would put the big airlines in charge of deciding fees and taxes within the system—the same airlines that collected over $12 billion in fees for seat selection and baggage from 2018 to 2023.
We hear the same tired, unproven refrain about privatizing air traffic control that we hear about a host of government services currently being considered for privatization by anti-government evangelists: The private sector is better and more efficient than the public sector. Canada is often cited as a model of ATC privatization to emulate. But the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recently conducted an audit of the Canadian aviation system and gave it a 65 out of 100 on flight safety oversight, a steep drop from 95 in the previous audit about 20 years ago. Nav Canada also continues to face personnel shortages that have interrupted dozens of flights at a time on several occasions this year. An IT outage within the UK’s privatized air traffic control system last year impacted 700,000 travelers and cost the public $127 million (USD). That’s likely why most countries have kept their air traffic control public.
The U.S. ATC system certainly has issues, especially related to its workforce and modernization. Those issues have a better chance of being addressed in the public’s interest if the system stays in public hands.
Donald Cohen
Executive Director