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The Gray Lady was blushing red over the past week after being accused of a smear campaign against bizav. First, a letter from NBAA CEO and President Ed Bolen; it was followed by a minute-long retaliatory video produced by Climb. Higher., a consortium of aviation groups promoting environmental sustainability.
The transportation reporters at Politico leered at the debate, launching one-liners and munching popcorn. The center of discussion, a proposal that's been floated time after time this century, of a model that could never fly in an American sky without handcuffing every neighborhood from Wall Street to Main Street.
The match that lit the fire
The New York Times Editorial Board published a three-and-a-half-minute video last Sunday, using well-established, often mythical, tropes to divide the proletariat flying in economy class from the celebrity-snob jet setters. Because, of course, that's the only two groups of people that fly. Ever.
The huddled masses scrape their pennies together all year to visit grandma for Thanksgiving, while the Hollywood elite zip across the sky in perpetuity, visiting tropical island after tropical island. That's it. Nobody else flies. For no other reason. And it's not fair to the Manhattan professionals who get paid to whine, nor to the people they think they represent.
Airfare tickets cover too much of the burden, and Justin Bieber should pay the same way to use American airports as he does in Canada. There is no need to discuss specifically American enterprises that depend upon solely American systems. That is the opinion of The New York Times Editorial Board.
"Each time you buy a plane ticket, you pay a small tax that you probably ignore," the video says. "It goes to the FAA, whose job it is to make sure your plane doesn't crash. That tax might sound reasonable, but here's the problem: Only some of us are paying it."
By the video's math, a commercial flight from Atlanta to Orlando would generate around $2,300 in fees, while a private jet flying the same city pair would pay around $60. Gas, apparently, is free.
The Times' board creates an analogy of the FAA operating a parking garage, where all cars but the fanciest ones pay $25, while the Lambos and McLarens that roll up to its turnstile pay a quarter a pop - 6.25 cents a tire. Their script goes on to blame Congress for taxing airline tickets in the 1970s to fund airport and ATC expansion - claiming private flights escape their tabs.
The Times board eventually acknowledges the multiples-higher aviation fuel tax paid by business aircraft but says "it comes nowhere close to covering the full cost of managing private planes," equating to an alleged $1 billion yearly subsidy from the commercial-flying public to "the private jet set."
The editorial board's conclusion and solution? The FAA manages planes, not passengers, and should be funded as such. And America should adopt the Canadian tax model supporting a fractionally smaller system, where fees are generated by aircraft weight and flight distance.
"Rarely is there such a straightforward opportunity to prove that you're fighting for the middle class," the video says. "So, Congress, are you going to ride with them, or with us?"
The board's leader
While we don't know how specific board members sided on this issue, we can look to the board's lead editor, David Leonhardt, and what he said in November 2023 about an "American stagnation" with problems rooted in a class division and a lack of investment in our future, particularly in aviation.
"A typical cross-country flight lasts about 30 minutes longer than it did in the 1960s because aviation technology has not advanced in ways that speed up the trip," he wrote. "Meanwhile, the (sky has) become so crowded that planes slow down to accommodate traffic. ... Only if you are wealthy enough to fly on a private jet can you easily recreate the travel times of past decades."
It's an interesting argument from a Pulitzer Prize winner who apparently does not realize that, over the 60-plus years since his nostalgic eutopia, those private jets incubated much of the technology that made today's airliners better, safer and more efficient - the same private jets destined to lay the DNA for future travel, whether to a neighborhood vertiport or Mars, as long as they're not taxed to death and shipped en masse to a desert-valley boneyard.
Bolen's response
Bolen could have chosen that arrow, the argument of private aviation paving the future of commercial flight. However, it was not among the selection of stones that he slingshotted back at Gotham Team Times.
Instead, he used real-world facts - that bizjets stopped landing at Reagan National Airport (DCA) after 9/11, but the operational cost of the facility barely budged, that airline hub-and-spokes drive the demand for towers and controllers.
He noted the conclusion of the GAO, the chief auditor of congressional purse strings, in a 2016 study showing that "general aviation flights often use minimal ATC services, so their costs to the system are actually quite small."
Bolen replaced the Times' parking garage analogy with that of a table of diners at a restaurant.
"One diner orders the most expensive items on the menu, then expects everyone to split the check equally," he stated. "Managing a large commercial airliner in the complex, often congested airspace around major commercial hubs such as New York, Chicago or Atlanta requires far more resources than managing a small aircraft at an outlying community airport. This kind of marginal use of the air traffic control (ATC) system by general aviation does not impose the same cost on its operation as that driven by the airlines."
And as far as all those celebrities and their private jets? Bolen contended that the board got it all wrong.
"Perhaps most importantly, your video looked past the role of business aviation as a critical part of our transportation system, connecting communities of all sizes, supporting more than a million American jobs and contributing $340 billion annually to the U.S. economy," he concluded. "Misleading and oversimplified portrayals like the one in your video do a disservice to the public and the policymakers tasked with making informed decisions about our aviation system."
Others in the fray
In a subscription email newsletter on Tuesday, Politico staffers referred to the Times' video as a "campaign," a quite specific word from a group of DC-Beltway pundits. An email from GlobalAir.com asking one of those staffers for elaboration on how its transportation team landed on such a politically loaded word went unreturned.
Politico's pithy blurb also took the commercial-versus-private tax debate all the way back to 2007, when Air Transportation Association leader Jim May said on behalf of the airlines, "a blip is a blip is a blip. So if there's a corporate jet flying at altitude 39,000 feet, it imposes the same demand on the system as a 737-800 from Southwest Airlines."
Bolen came to the industry's defense in that Congressional hearing, as well, in an earlier instance of him making his case with the restaurant analogy. It's something he's done numerous times since. This year, it was the New York Times. In 2022, it was Bloomberg, and in 2020, the LA Times. Last year, a host of media outlets of various shapes and sizes had to reset their records after being overly reliant on reporting generated by releases from interest groups, in each case with Bolen insisting that newsrooms examine the full picture.
From the fourth Bush administration term to the second (non-consecutive) Trump administration term - with Obamas and a Biden in between - a different sort of American stagflation has gripped the argument over airport funding - a division in the sky as old as controlled flight itself. Not one presidential pen over those decades agreed with the Editorial Board of The New York Times.Yet Bolen isn't the only one circling the wagons. He has cover from cavalry from the companion group Climbing. Fast. A video geared for a TV ad campaign (but released online this week with no announcement of any advertising buy) sways the debate in a different direction, focusing on the benefits of private flight for small businesses and rural America, operators in the land otherwise dubbed in airline parlance as fly-over states.
"What is business aviation?" the video asks. "It connects communities where commercial flights are few and far between. It helps small business thrive by transporting goods across the nation and the world. It's a lifeline to ensure medical and emergency services quickly reach remote parts of our country. It creates 1.3 million jobs and drives $340 billion in economic activity.
"And while business aviation doesn't drive the cost to run the aviation system the way the big airlines do, business aviation is proud to be paying its fair share primarily through fuel taxes to ensure the entire system remains efficient and safe for all. Our footprint may be small, but our impact is felt by millions of Americans every day."
Getting taxed like Canada
So what about that proposal from The New York Times Editorial Board - to tax American aircraft based on weight and flight distance like Canada does, rather than by passenger haul and at the fuel pump? Well, we think we did the math. ...
The currency exchange rate and metric system had to be addressed. Canadian dollars become US greenbacks; kilograms become pounds, and kilometers become nautical miles. We're not guaranteeing the numbers are exact, but at a rate multiplier of 2.6 cents (about a third lower than the real oone applied in CAD), here is what we came up with for distance flown in nautical miles (as measured by our Airport Resource Center) for MTOW measured in pounds (as measured on the aircraft specs pages in our Aircraft for Sale section).For an Airbus A320 maxed out at 194 passengers, the tax levied would be $22,900 between JFK Airport in New York to LAX in California. That's $118.50 per passenger.
A Bombardier Global 7500 hauling 19 passengers on the same route (we selected a Canadian plane purely by coincidence - this is merely mission-to-mission to get it as apples-to-apples as possible) would pay $18,187 under the same formula - $957.21 per passenger, eight times as much.
And it's not like Fortune 100 companies would waive the white flag on global positioning. They would still pay to fly private, unless it got so crazy they couldn't and the financial markets fainted. But everyone else would pony up, as well.
If executives from Coca-Cola need to make such a flight in such a world, the cost of a soda is going to fizz up, and the public will be squawking when executives at Tyson make the same flight and the cost of chicken soars everywhere from Kroger to KFC. The difference would be in the small corporations and family businesses. They would lose a vital competitive edge on the global front, unable to cover ground in a normal workday, stuck in terminals governed by hubs and spokes while the rest of the world takes their lunch money.
At a smaller scale, comparing a popular plane for regional airlines to a jet for a small business successful enough to fly private at a distance common to both, it comes to $90.70 per passenger on an Embraer ERJ-145 (50 PAX at $4,535) to fly from Washington, DC (Leesburg Executive Airport - JYO - in Virginia) to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL).
A Cessna Citation CJ4 with 10 passengers would dole out $269.30 per seat ($2,693) flying the same path.
Under this tax plan, without a massive subsidy from Washington picking and choosing winners and losers, fixed-wing medical flights would be grounded, and private flights for disaster relief would be untenable.
Our admittedly rustic model uses scenarios where every seat is full. The numbers only go up for small-jet and turboprop cargo missions and combination flights. If you haul your goods in a King Air, your goods are going to have to go back 100 years and buy a train ticket.
The Justin Biebers of the world could still visit every island imaginable, celebrity middle fingers pointed down at Middle America, but the workforce of private aviation, the backbone of the industry, would be the true ones getting worked over.Industry adapts, right? Tell that to your local flight school. Taxed on every touch and every go, the cost of training would blast off to costs of infinity and beyond. That alleged pilot shortage? Well, automation had better get real good real fast. And the FAA better greenlight all those robot pilots yesterday with the dollars it already has. Keep in mind for the next time we debate this...Missouri Republican Congressman Sam Graves, a longtime fiscal friend of aviation, addressed these same exact problems debating the same exact thing in 2007. He counterargued that a blip is not a blip and that all radar signatures are not the same.
"This is going to make the sky safer because nobody's going to be able to fly anymore," he said of the proposal then, "except the commercial carriers." That argument does not fly with The New York Times Editorial Board, as its members fly exclusively in coach.