The FAA’s budgetary woes are but one symptom of the U.S. fiscal freight train that has been speeding down the track with ever greater wobbles since 9/11. Twenty-odd years ago there was outrage in the aviation community that the sacred cash in the aviation “trust fund” (a misnomer if ever there was one) was being used to make the federal deficit look smaller and to pay for the FAA’s day-to-day operations rather than to maintain and improve the airports and airways for which it was intended; nowadays nobody bats an eye, but even after siphoning the trust-fund billions the agency still has barely two pennies to rub together, it seems.
How does this affect business aviation? The more obvious, operational results of these FAA expenditures are the helpful voices that are piped into pilots’ headsets, the upkeep of the runways we use and so on. NATCA has made a career of reacting fast and furiously to any suggestion of controller cutbacks.
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