THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 31, 1995 TAG: 9507280021
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Sometimes the United States acts less like a superpower than a banana republic. We are the premier aerospace power in the world. We build the planes. We rely on a huge volume of air transport for both business and pleasure. Yet it's taken 15 years to upgrade an outmoded air-traffic-control system, and still the end is not in sight.
This week again, Chicago's O'Hare was crippled by computer problems. The project to update has been plagued by cost overruns, technical glitches and unconscionable delays. One administration after another has toyed with the project - changed contractors, cut funding, increased funding, realigned funding.
The latest iteration is the Clinton proposal to partially privatize air-traffic control. As a federal corporation, an independent air-traffic system would escape the smothering embrace of the FAA. It could finance its own upgrade from ticket taxes that amount to more than $4 billion a year. Sounds good.
Clearly, something must be done to move this project along. At a projected expense of $7 billion, real money is at stake. And in an era of belt-tightening, cost-cutters naturally eye the checkered history of an updated air-traffic-control system and the expense it will entail and imagine savings. But this nation needs a reliable, state-of-the-art system, just as it needed an interstate highway network in the 1950s.
Clearly, waste and incompetence must be avoided, but that shouldn't impede the installation of a system that works in a timely manner. We can't wait another 15 years for closure.
Newt Gingrich is an enthusiast for a high-technology future and mocks an air-traffic system still running on vacuum tubes. The like-minded Al Gore is behind a privatized air-traffic system as part of his reinventing government initiative.
They're both right. The legislation should be passed and an aggressive administrator hired, preferably one from the private sector who knows how to go from plans to finished project. Based on the revenues from the passenger-ticket tax, ample money is available to do the job. And the job needs to be done now.
A 21st-century air-traffic-control system is a much more urgent priority than space stations, supercolliders or B-2 bombers. Republicans and Democrats need to get together on this thing and get it done. The safety, comfort and convenience of the flying public, not to mention the commercial needs of the nation, are at stake. by CNB