ATC privatization?
 

Without discussing personality of the President and evil intention of airline executives, couple questions come into mind:

- Is privatization of ATC doable?
- How much average fees (i would assume departure tax) should increase to (this is important) entirely cover infrastructure modernization costs?
- How privatization of ATC would prevent repeating of 1981 incident?

I'm not sure what good it would do. It would absolutely kill general aviation in the US though.

Are you suggesting that general aviation cannot pay for their own use of the ATC and needs subsidies? Which means people like me who never use GA should pay more taxes than we would if it were privatized? Not sure how I feel about that.

I don't know anything about subsidies or taxes, but if ATC is privatized, I could see airlines enforcing their own ATC companies in different airports where they have hubs. Which in turn would lead to those airlines preferring to fly only into airports where their ATC company is in control, in order to minimize costs, that turns into a reduction of routes across the board and individual monopolies in select regions.

Yes.
More than the airlines want to pay.
It wouldn't.

I don't think that the privatization would see different ATC rates per airport necessarily, but the overall shift in costs and process is one that I believe would be bad for the overall airspace in the USA.

Yes, modernization is necessary. But the main problem the FAA has faced recently is political motivations around proper funding. Shifting to a privately managed operation would potentially remove some of the politics and replace it with other challenges to effectively and appropriately sharing the necessary costs of operating such a system.

The privatization can be done in at least two ways. First way is to sell off the assets and ATC rights to a party who is going to want to maximize return on its investment as much as possible.

A second way would be what Canada did and structure the ATC entity as a not-for-profit system. The entity can, or would have to levy ATC charges (which would probably encourage fewer flights and large aircraft) on users, and would also be able to raise funding for new equipment based on this right.

I doubt if it is a good idea to separate ATC into regions otherwise you might end up with something like China, or to allow airlines to own an ATC entity.

All ATC entities will still have to cooperate with military ATC.

I'm not so sure that Nav Canada (private ATC) is the model to follow. When Air Canada, Nav Canada's largest customer filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and failed to pay their ATC bills, it almost caused the financial collapse of Nav Canada. That could not have occurred if Transport Canada (public ATC) were still in charge.