Yesterday, in a bipartisan show of support against user fees, the four top members of the House Transportation and Aviation Subcommittees went before the Ways and Means Committee on the subject. It was in an effort to urge the tax-writing Ways and Means committee to modify aviation excise taxes instead and abandon the concept of user fees altogether.

Undeniably the airlines, represented through the ATA, were not happy with this latest blow. It would allow for a slight increase in taxes on General Aviation but abandon the idea of a user fee system, something the airlines had been pushing for all along. Most notably several airlines had even published articles in their in flight magazines which took a deceptively warm tone towards billing General Aviation for each FAA service it utilized.

Imposing user fees on General Aviation would have all but killed it off completely. As a direct result, it would have temporarily lowered the costs the airlines pay towards funding the FAA, which had been facing a budget shortfall for sometime.

All of this raises some interesting points. If the airlines get their way with user fees (unlikely now), and General Aviation suffered their malicious after-effects, the birth rate of new commercial pilots then would have also suffered. With the present and projected shortfall in professional pilots nationwide, the airlines would be effectively shooting themselves in the foot. Oops number one. And had GA suffered under the effects of user fees to the point that itself had been effectively killed off altogether, that new and exciting source of FAA funding for the airlines would have also been killed off, along with those associated taxes already in place. Oops numbers two and three.

~Capt’n chris

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