In the wake of the tragic air crash last week at Reagan National Airport in Washington, accusations are flying back and forth as politicians seek to lay blame and score political points for themselves. President Donald Trump blamed “diversity hiring” in part for the tragedy, while the New York Times and other media outlets pointed to staffing shortages in many Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control towers.
Last fall, the US General Accounting Office published a report for Congress entitled “FAA Actions Are Urgently Needed to Modernize Aging Systems,” which pointed out that much of the equipment used to track and guide aircraft at the nation’s airports was outdated or in need of repair. The New York Times declared:
A federal watchdog raised concerns about the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controller systems, saying that many are critically outdated and that the agency’s heavy reliance on them could jeopardize the safety and efficiency of the nation’s airspace.
A Government Accountability Office evaluation of the F.A.A.’s 138 air traffic controller systems found that 51 are considered unsustainable, while another 54 are deemed potentially unsustainable, according to a report released on Monday.
The accountability office said many of those systems “have critical operational impacts” on air traffic safety and efficiency. Many of them are also facing “challenges that are historically problematic for aging systems,” according to the report.
“These challenges,” it added, “include no longer meeting mission needs, difficulty finding spare parts and limited technical staff with expertise in repairing the aging system.”
When a third of the ATC systems are deemed “unsustainable,” with no good help on the horizon, it is safe to say that the real miracle is that there are very few accidents that can be traced to these faulty systems even though some are 50 years old and a large number of them are 20-30 years old. Fortune wrote about the GAO report:
It found that 37% of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems were deemed unsustainable, meaning replacements come sparingly and there is a significant lack of funding available to modernize the technology.
For example, the Airport Surface Detection Equipment Model-X, which debuted in the early 2000s, tracks movement on the runway. But spare parts for this device are “extremely limited and may require expensive special engineering.”
Additionally, beacon replacement antennas are no longer available as they are on average two decades old. And 25-year-old landing systems used to help aircraft on its final approach now lack manufacturing support.
The report also highlighted several unnamed systems critical to safety and operations that are 20 to 30 years old, with some up to 50 years old. Timetables for reinvestment in the systems won’t occur until 2030 at the earliest, if at all.
According to the report, the FAA did not use risk assessment to prioritize or establish short-term plans to modernize systems lacking a timeline. (emphasis mine)
Staffing shortfalls also are a problem, and, according to the union that represents the air traffic controllers:
More than 90 percent of the country’s 313 air traffic control facilities operate below the Federal Aviation Administration’s recommended staffing levels, according to an analysis of staffing data from the union representing controllers obtained by The New York Times.
As of earlier this month, 285 facilities — which include traffic control towers and other locations — were below staffing thresholds set by the F.A.A. and the union. At 73 of those facilities, staffing is so low that at least a quarter of the work force is missing.
In a recent article on the problems with US air traffic control, John Tierney wrote:
Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.
The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.
It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.
Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.
In reading these reports, one wonders why there are not more air crashes at the nation’s airports, given the sorry state of ATC systems. Not surprisingly, the US Department of Transportation—when confronted with the GAO report—declared that “reinvestment” in the systems will be a top priority.
Yet, “reinvestment” is impossible because the FAA does not “invest” in ATC systems or anything else. Whatever capital equipment the agency uses cannot be termed an investment because the FAA does not turn a profit, so it is impossible to measure any “return on investment” that would come with purchasing new ATC systems. Indeed, as the Fortune article pointed out, the FAA does not use risk assessment or employ other methods that a profit-making entity would do as a matter of course. While this revelation is shocking when one realizes what is at stake, we should not be surprised, given that the FAA cannot engage in economic calculation because of its government agency status.
Of course, all organizations, including government agencies, must use some form of analysis and calculation to make decisions about daily operations and the organization’s future, but the kind of calculation that will be done depends upon whether the entity is profit-seeking or not. Profit-seeking firms—according to Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy—will be guided by market prices:
In the capitalist system all designing and planning is based on the market prices. Without them all the projects and blueprints of the engineers would be a mere academic pastime. They would demonstrate what could be done and how. But they would not be in a position to determine whether the realization of a certain project would really increase material well-being or whether it would not, by withdrawing scarce factors of production from other lines, jeopardize the satisfaction of more urgent needs, that is, of needs considered more urgent by the consumers.
This is especially true regarding capital investments made by business firms. The purpose of capital is to enable a firm to become more productive and profitable, enabling purchasers of capital goods to determine a return on investment and to do both short-range and long-range planning based on estimates of profitability in the future.
That clearly is not the case with an organization like the FAA, which exists because Congress created it and gave it a legal monopoly over air traffic control at the nation’s airports. The FAA does not sell its services, and airlines and passengers are not FAA customers. While the FAA charges fees, they are not market prices. As a government entity, the FAA operates as a socialist enterprise, and will operate under limitations that Mises describes:
…under socialism there would be neither discernible profits nor discernible losses. Where there is no calculation, there is no means of getting an answer to the question whether the projects planned or carried out were those best fitted to satisfy the most urgent needs; success and failure remain unrecognized in the dark.
Indeed, this description helps to explain the FAA’s planning issues pointed out earlier. Furthermore, the FAA uses capital goods, but because there is no way to calculate the value these goods can bring to that agency, any decision to update the ATC systems or bring in new equipment must be based on something other than the Misesian economic calculation. Given the FAA is a government entity, then the only decision-making route left is the political process.
Likewise, the employment shortfalls in the airport control towers also can be explained by the lack of economic calculation. A profit-seeking organization would look to hire employees that would have the skills to help the firm be profitable. However, unlike a private company, the FAA will never go out of business if Congress deems it necessary, even if the FAA’s practices leave passengers vulnerable to aviation accidents.
Because hiring decisions with any government entity are ultimately political, we are likely to see the same thing with employment with the FAA. While this article is not a commentary on DEI employment practices, nonetheless, one is more likely to see an emphasis on DEI and other political goals in hiring than one would see with a profit-seeking private firm.
Air traffic control jobs are infamously stressful, but those in charge at the FAA have no incentives to find ways to employ new capital to make the jobs easier. There are no entrepreneurs that would find ways to revamp production of those services, at least within the FAA itself. (Since the capital goods used for the ATC systems are produced by private firms, there is some entrepreneurship in their development, but that is as far as it goes. The system that employs the capital uses bureaucratic methods to achieve what should be done entrepreneurially.)
Of course, there will be hearings featuring the usual grandstanding by politicians berating someone for not “doing your job,” as though a bloviating member of Congress would do any better. The ATC systems will continue to be outdated, using obsolete equipment because progressives believe that a system based upon political decision making will be morally and technologically superior to anything produced in a free market. No doubt, there will be future GAO reports on the FAA that will decry a broken-down system, and we will see the same response: shock, anger, promises to “do better,” and then no changes. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
