Trump Wants To Make Flying Suck Less And I'm All In On That
Fox News — President Trump announced his plan Monday to privatize America’s air traffic control system and separate it from the FAA — arguing the federal agency is too “antiquated” to innovate and casting the overhaul as an initial step toward improving the country’s infrastructure.
Trump wants to turn the air traffic control system into a modernized non-profit organization that operates on fees paid by airlines and others that use U.S. airspace, instead of taxes.
“We are prepared to enter a great new era in American aviation,” Trump said, in announcing the plan at the White House. “It’s time to join the future and make flights quicker, safer, more reliable.”
Stop right there, Donnie. Stop right there. You had me at “make flights quicker, safer, more reliable.” I’m all fucking in on that. Don’t care how you’re doing it. Don’t care why you’re doing it. Don’t care who’s going to get fucked in the process of you doing it. Don’t care about any of those things whatsoever — you make flying better, you’ve got my backing. I’ll go to war for that shit.
He did keep going, however, and I did like this point:
There are about 50,000 airline and other aircraft flights a day in the United States. Trump said Monday that the existing system was created when the country had about 100,000 annual airline passengers, compared to nearly 1 billion today.
Yeah, still rocking a system built for an industry that is NOTHING like it was when it was built? Nope, fuck that. Time for a change. And I don’t know how relevant that tweeted quote from Donnie is about us having GPS on our phones while the aviation towers are using radar, but works for me. Sound bite city.
Bottom line is this — pretty much anything government-run is inefficient as hell. There’s a reason Newman and his work habits were the butt of like half the jokes in Seinfeld. Privatization = more efficient than publicly-funded, simply because privatized entities MUST be efficient to survive. In the private sector, if it fails it dies; there is no safety net (unless you’re Wall Street).
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Flying sucks dick and it always will. It will never be good or fun. But anyone making any effort or with any plan to make it suck less is A-OK in my book. Do it.
PS — While we’re at it, if we could add something where guys that miss their flights out of Vegas by 4 hours simply get on the next flight for free, that’d be great.