In 2017, during his first term in office, President Trump announced his intention to privatize the U.S. air traffic control system, calling it "stuck, painfully, in the past." The proposal never took off.
The current Trump administration is again focused on reforming air traffic control, following a recent spate of technical outages and staffing shortages as well as the January midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people.
But this time the goal is a multibillion-dollar investment in the Federal Aviation Administration — and talk of privatization seems to be on hold.
"To have a fight about privatization is just going to divide people," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a press conference last month. "And what that'll actually do is make sure that we don't actually build a brand new air traffic control system."
Aviation industry groups that once supported privatization are now uniting behind Duffy's plan to modernize the system by upgrading antiquated equipment and "supercharging" the hiring of new controllers. The proposal has the backing of the Modern Skies Coalition, a collection of groups that includes the trade association for the major airlines, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and others.
But the recent travel disruptions have also resurfaced the argument of some FAA critics that the best way to fix the nation's air traffic control system is to remove it from direct government control altogether.
How air traffic control is organized in Canada and beyond
Proponents of air traffic control privatization often point to Canada as an example. The U.S.'s northern neighbor privatized its system in 1996, when the government sold it to the non-profit NAV CANADA for $1.5 billion.
Canada's air travel system had been fraught with delays, and privatization made it easier to buy new technology that improved air travel without having to go through a slow-moving public procurement process, said McGill University aviation law professor Vincent Correia. "The privatization aimed at finding a way to overcome those inefficiencies, most notably by having a more flexible approach when it comes to investments," he said.
The system's funding stream also changed. Canada went from paying for air traffic control largely through tax revenue to charging customers a fee based on the weight and distance of a flight.
According to Correia, privatizing air traffic control was the next move for an aviation sector that already had privately-held airplane manufacturers and commercial airlines. "So basically the step that was taken by Canada was to say, well, air traffic control is providing a service to an industry that is already privatized or mostly privatized in many regions of the world," he said.
Other air traffic control systems that exist outside or partially outside the government include NATS in the United Kingdom, Airservices Australia, Airways New Zealand, DFS in Germany and Skyguide in Switzerland.
A 2017 report by the Congressional Research Service said other countries' models don't appear to show "conclusive evidence that any of these models is either superior or inferior to others or to existing government-run air traffic services, including FAA, with respect to productivity, cost-effectiveness, service quality, and safety and security."
Still, there are private air traffic controllers working in the U.S. today. Through its Contract Tower Program, the FAA allows airports with limited air traffic to staff their towers with controllers employed by private companies. Just over half of all federal air traffic control towers are contract towers, mostly because they're at smaller general aviation airports.
The U.S. privatization debate has foundered
Opponents of privatization say it hasn't always worked out so well for the countries that have done it. They point, for example, to a 2023 report from the International Civil Aviation Organization that lowered Canada's flight safety grade and a recent shortage of air traffic controllers.
Ed Bolen, CEO of the National Business Aviation Association, says a private system would be even harder to operate in the U.S., which has one of the largest and most complex airspaces in the world.
"When we look around at the performance in Australia, in New Zealand, in Europe, in the United Kingdom and in Canada, we see very small, not particularly complex operations compared to the U.S. and we see chronic delays," he said.
Another worry is that privatization could disadvantage smaller airports and pilots who don't produce the same economic impact as large airlines, says Jim Coon, senior vice president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
"That would be very detrimental to many small communities around the country that rely on these small airports for medical issues, for disaster relief, for businesses, because those airports don't bring in the amount of revenue that the large airports that the airlines use," he said.
The board of directors of NAV CANADA is required to have members selected by the airlines, general aviation, the government and workers' unions.
The Covid-19 outbreak exposed another issue with privatization. Because some countries' systems were funded by user fees, air traffic control operators ran into trouble when air travel dramatically decreased due to the pandemic.
But Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation, says the U.S. air traffic control system could be improved by turning it into what he calls a public utility. (The Clinton administration suggested transforming U.S. air traffic control into a quasi-government corporation in 1994.)
Currently, Poole says, travelers and airlines pay taxes that go to the U.S. Treasury, and that money then has to be appropriated by Congress to the FAA. In a public utility model, "the revenues would go directly to the air traffic corporation, whether it's a nonprofit or a government corporation," he said.
The public utility could issue bonds to fund large projects — which the FAA can't do — and streamline its procurement process, Poole added.
He also said the FAA, in its role as a safety regulator, would be more empowered to enforce safety infractions if air traffic controllers were not FAA employees. "So you have a better protection for aviation safety in this vital part of the system — air traffic control — which today in the United States unfortunately is embedded in the safety regulator and not at arm's length from the safety regulator," he said.
U.S. privatization likely not on the horizon
Former Republican Rep. Bill Shuster, who proposed legislation in Congress privatizing air traffic control in 2017, was advocating for the idea as recently as November, AIN reported. In December, the libertarian Cato Institute published an article urging Trump to privatize the system.
But within the aviation industry, calls to privatize air traffic control have largely faded.
Even the major airlines, once vocal supporters of privatization, have cooled on it. The trade group Airlines for America, which backed Trump's 2017 privatization effort, co-signed a letter with other aviation groups in February opposing privatization, saying it would be a "distraction" from the planned upgrades to the air traffic control system.
Coon, with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, says the aviation industry is coalescing behind the Trump administration's plan to modernize the national air traffic control system, largely leaving privatization behind for now.
"It's been discussed for decades. There's not consensus there," he said. "But there is consensus now to modernize our system, and that's what we want to do."
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