American Air Traffic Control System Pros And Cons

836 Words4 Pages

Disruption in the Skies

Safety and efficiency tend to be the two biggest things on people's minds when traveling by air. The American Air Traffic Control system is one of the most successful at accomplishing these tasks in the world. However, there is a movement to potentially change that. The privatization of Air Traffic Control (ATC) would be very harmful to the aviation industry because it would raise commercial airline ticket prices, increase the likelihood of a disaster, and it would take up a large sum of the US budget to fix a system that is not broken.

To begin, Privatizing America's ATC would cause commercial airline tickets to skyrocket in price. For example, Canada has one of the most successful examples of ATC being privatized …show more content…

Currently, the American air traffic control system uses a lot of technologies that have been around for many years. Some of these technologies include radio beacons originally designed in the 1930's, and radar surveillance systems that track planes movement, and that was originally designed in the 1950's (Poole). While it is true that the technology was designed many years ago, it has proven itself to be far from outdated. Many of the people find the main advantage that would come from the privatization of the American air traffic control system would be more modern technology being brought into aircrafts and towers, however this would be very costly. That large cost adds up,and may even be enough to bankrupt a lot of private companies. If this were to happen, there would be many planes left without anyone to control them. That is part of the reason why many democrats believe that it is necessary to keep ATC government funded (DiMascino). Also, there is a very large cost on privatizing the industry to being with. It is estimated that the total cost of privatizing the American air traffic control system would cost roughly around one-hundred billion dollars (Pope). With America's national debt already being so large, it seems somewhat silly to spend that amount of money on ATC privatization. With the proven safety of the current ATC system in place, spending that much is just not necessary, even if privatization was not so risky. To conclude, privatizing the American air traffic control system would be very costly, and would just be fixing a system that is perfectly fine the way it