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by mullen 3304 days ago
> Donald Trump on Monday unveiled his proposal to hand over control of the U.S. air-traffic control system to a non-profit corporation, calling the current system an antiquated mess that doesn’t work and wastes money.

Did someone point out to this idiot that we are having a string of years where there are no deaths in domestic commercial travel. Whatever is happening in the US Traffic System appears to be working really well.

I also think that president holds a person vendetta against the FAA because it told him he could not land his plane somewhere or an air traffic controller delayed him by a couple of minutes.

4 comments

Indeed he has something against air traffic in general.

I remember an article where it claimed someone told him to buy a house near airport and sue them for noise. According to Wikipedia he did it twice and lost twice teen sold the property.

Here is another article on same subject:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/13/luxury/trump-palm-beach-laws...

Which must have happened before he became President. Air Force One gets to hear something before anyone else: "cleared to land".
Maybe you're the idiot, if you think that passenger fatalities is the only metric that matters(note: it matters a lot!)

How can you know how well the US ATC is operating if you don't know how much money they spend? If they spent 10x what they currently do(but still had no passenger fatalities), would you say everything is great?

The average person can reasonably afford to buy a plane ticket to travel across the US. Right now, the odds of them dying is really low. In fact, so low that driving to the airport puts them in more danger than flying across the country.

We can take that system and throw it out and see if we can change it with zero guarantee of success to save all of $5 or maybe $10 (Just a guess). I don't know about you, but I am happy with the current system and it's costs.

You don't even know how much the current system costs, how can you be happy with it? This goes back to my statement about perhaps you are the idiot. Not because you are against this move by Trump, but because you have a strong opinion on it while knowing almost nothing about the system in question.
These people are not being fired, just being transferred to a new company. I believe they will continue to perform at the same level. And with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation. A win-win for everyone. Only reason of opposing this would be personal vendetta against Trump.
with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation

How do you figure?

Unless there are to be multiple competing ATC firms, such an efficiency gain is impossible.
Not referencing a whole field dedicated to this. Just sharing an anecdote. My father works for a government mining company. His job is that of a translator. Now no one use the language he was supposed to translate from. So he goes to office does some stuff and come backs home. We get govt housing and energy, medical (children till 25 and employees parent till death, two paid yearly holidays for the whole family.
And it pains you that the mine isn't privatized so that the new CEO can fire your father and buy himself an extra yacht?
> with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation

Yes, we know this must be the ultimate truth, always, everywhere, because Ayn Rand says so.

/s

> with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation

I can only assume that you have never worked for a large corporation.

Not to mention that the phrase 'optimal resource allocation' is ambiguous in the extreme; what function are you minimizing?