Opinion: Columnists
Sean Higgins,
Senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner
Three US Airways jets came uncomfortably close to crashing into each other above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport a month ago, thanks to botched instructions from the air traffic controllers there.
This followed an incident in March that has become depressingly familiar: A controller fell asleep on the job, forcing two planes to land without assistance from the tower. The Federal Aviation Administration reported 1,887 such "operational errors" in fiscal 2010, up from 1,234 the previous fiscal year.
We wouldn't have to run a lot of these risks in the first place if the United States used the most up-to-date air traffic control technology. Global positioning systems have revolutionized air travel, overtaking the old radar-based technology. But progress in adopting the new technology has been slow.
"If we had these [GPS] systems in place, we could reduce congestion and improve air traffic control and dispatching so that the likelihood of these situations occurring would be reduced," said Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Why the FAA is so slow to change is a classic tale of big-government inertia: layer upon layer of regulatory red tape, cost overruns and public-sector unions being given virtual veto power over any change. Meanwhile the efforts to make air traffic safer languish.
Read more here: http://washingtonexaminer.com
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