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With his extensive experience in running Trump Airlines into the ground ...
The high debt forced Trump to default on his loans, and ownership of the company was turned over to creditors.
… Donald Trump is obviously the right person to lead American air travel into the future. In a speech introduced with elaborate fanfare and top-notch sycophancy by Mike Pence (“Thanks to President Donald Trump, America is back!”) Trump marched out on Monday morning to announce that he was starting “Infrastructure Week” of his regime by privatizing the nation’s air traffic control system.
Like all Trump announcements, it required that he execute an attack on the Obama administration as the source of all problems.
"Honestly, they didn't know what the hell they were doing," Trump said. "A total waste of money."
Trump’s solution? A quasi-private monopoly over the nation’s air traffic control system, bid out to “one great company.” And yes, this unpresidented merger of corporate and state power would provide what everyone wants:
"Today we're proposing to take American air travel into the future … finally ... finally, finally. It's been a long time. We're proposing decreased wait time, increased route efficiency, and with far fewer delays ... and yes, for the first time in a long time, on time."
Get out your stopwatches. The countdown to when Trump announces that modernizing air traffic control was much harder than “anyone” knew, starts … now.
The air traffic control system has been a target for privatization for more than two decades, and the FAA’s ability to upgrade has been seriously hampered by a series of conflicting requirements pushed on them by a Congress more interested in how the system can be turned into local jobs rather than how it can be made safer or more effective.
In fact, Republicans have done everything they can to break the FAA, just so they could bring it to this point.
It’s a classic Republican strategy to break the government and then advocate for cutting or privatizing said government because it’s broken, so no surprises there. And what about the funding for this big new NextGen system? According to Kevin DeGood at the Center for American Progress:
Privatization represents a bold attempt by the aviation industry to carve out operations and procurement activities along with most or all of AATF funding, while dumping responsibility for remaining FAA functions onto taxpayers. [...] In short, privatization would provide the aviation industry with the operational control it wants while also offloading a major funding responsibility.
Republicans haven’t just hampered any progress on air traffic control, they’ve played a game of chicken with the safety of air travel, putting the flying public on the line. And in fact, the upgrade to NextGen is still in progress, though this new proposal would seem to signal that the effort made so far is going to be discarded.
Trump made a point in his presentation of saying that the price of an airline ticket would no longer include a percentage going to the government. He left out that the same amount—or more—would go to this new corporation. A corporation that Trump promised would cost taxpayers nothing.
In fact, Trump went down the line of problems with previous attempts at privatizing the system—keeping existing controllers in the system, working with private pilots, keeping small airports possible—and promised that his new system would solve every one of these problems. It’s a promise that, like most Trump promises, is very easy to make when you don’t have any details.
Just think of it as TrumpCare for the air.
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