White House Wants to Cut FAA Budget

[Placebo]

The Bush administration wants to trim the Federal Aviation Administration budget for buying new air traffic control equipment at a time when more planes are in the air.

Air traffic controllers argue that more backup equipment could have mitigated the shutdown of a radio system at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday that left controllers unable to talk to pilots and caused a ripple effect of delays across the country.

Controllers have been asking the FAA for another backup radio system for years, said Hamid Ghaffari, president of the local air traffic controllers union in Los Angeles.

"The response was, 'We don't have the funding,'" Ghaffari said.

The loss of voice contact with pilots caused at least five incidents where planes flew dangerously close to each other and delayed or canceled hundreds of flights.

FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the Los Angeles air traffic control center already has two backup systems.

Sept. 2 was the busiest day ever for the U.S. air traffic control system. The FAA forecasts a 24 percent increase in the number of planes in the sky — including passenger and cargo planes, general aviation and military aircraft — between this year and 2015.

But the administration has proposed cutting next year's FAA budget for equipment and facilities by 12.6 percent, from $2.862 billion to $2.5 billion. Both the House and the Senate have gone along with that figure so far in the budget process.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&u=/ap/20040916/ap_on_go_pr_wh/faa_budget&printer=1

[JohnKleeb]

1. Agh

I worked as an ATC intern for two summers, they already have problems as is. NATCA btw is a great union, I talked with the Dulles NATCA head a couple of times, nice man.

[bluedeminredstate]

5. And we all know what a bang up job

the FAA did on September 11th, so this makes perfect sense.
:mad:

[UpInArms]

10. and just this week

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0916airtraffic16.html

Maintenance slip caused airport chaos

A communications shutdown that created chaos Tuesday evening for airlines and travelers across the West was blamed on the failure of workers to perform a routine maintenance check at a major traffic-control center in California, the Federal Aviation Administration reported Wednesday.

The oversight caused the system to automatically turn off, cutting radio communication with hundreds of aircraft for about five hours. Flights bound for airports in Southern California and Nevada were diverted to other airports outside the control center's airspace, including dozens of planes rerouted to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

"To put it in simplest terms, the system requires maintenance every 30 days, and that didn't happen," FAA spokesman Greg Martin said Wednesday, adding that the agency is investigating how the oversight occurred.

He said the required maintenance was analogous to rebooting a personal computer.

The electronic system at the Palmdale, Calif., traffic-control center where the outage happened is being updated to prevent a recurrence of Tuesday's incident, said FAA spokesman Rick Day, as well as the systems at the 20 other FAA control centers across the United States.

...more...

Let's see how safe those "friendly" skies become.

:grr:

[Leilani]

2. He has bankrupted our country

Money is only available for Iraq & tax cuts.

Everything else has gone to hell.

[kestrel91316]

3. Bush clearly cares a LOT more about...................

tax cuts for the super-rich than he does about the lives of ordinary Americans. "Bring on the midair collisions!!"

[tibbir]

6. He figures the super-rich can just take their private jets.

Doesn't everybody?

[napi21]

13. I hate to break this to him, but private aircraft use the FAA too!!!

He's dumber than I thought if he really thinks that!

[Poiuyt]

9. "Bush clearly cares a LOT more about..................."

Iraq than he does about America

[JohnKleeb]

4. another question I have for this adminstration

Just how do you expect to prevent future 9/11's by slashing the ATC and FAA budget? you know its very hard to see whats going on with your bare eyes, you need the technology like GPS etc.

[kysrsoze]

7. That sounds like a great idea! Fuck it. Why don't we just cut it in half?

This cannot be happening. Then again, I suppose anything is possible these days.

[drdtroit]

8. If we haven't figured out yet where the real

terrorist threats come from, God save us.

[hatrack]

11. Well thank God he's serious about slashing government spending & waste!!

Unbelievable.

I hope Grover Norquist is on a plane the next time the radars go down - it would be a great opportunity for him to revel in the benefits of a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

[gratuitous]

12. "We don't have the funding"

Nope, because we've poured $200 billion into Iraq because Saddam was a bad, bad man.

Add this to the list of things the country will be doing without when your conservative friends say, "Well, isn't the world better off without Saddam in power?" Take the smirk right off their porcine little faces:

Yeah, getting rid of Saddam was worth:

Cuts in air traffic control equipment
No more police
No additional inspections of shipping containers
An overworked and overextended military
A total compromise of our ability to respond to real threats

But we got Saddam! There's no question about that. We definitely removed him from power. At the cost of thousands of lives and our standing in the international community.

[Rockholm]

14. The FAA is going to be ABSORBED into the DHS.

If bush wins the election, the FAA will no longer be a civilian organization. My brother-in-law works for the FAA and he said that is will be put under the control of the Dept of Homeland Security and possibly militarized.