Opinion | If You Fly Economy, You’re Paying for Someone Else to Fly Private

If you travel on a plane that looks like this, then you’re paying for people to travel like this. [CHORAL MUSIC] You heard that right. If you’re a member of the economy class, the seat reclined in your face class, the overhead compartment won’t close class, then you’re subsidizing this guy. “I’m actually going to Vegas on my jet, [BLEEP].” You’re subsidizing a class of people who would probably call this thing the public plane. It sounds absurd, but it’s true. And it’s why we think it’s time for Congress to stop making us pay for them. This is the opinion of the New York Times editorial board. Each time you buy a plane ticket, you pay a small tax that you probably ignore. It goes to the F.A.A., whose job it is to make sure that your plane doesn’t crash. That tax might sound reasonable, but here’s the problem. Only some of us are paying it. Consider the nation’s busiest passenger route between Atlanta and Orlando. The passengers on a commercial flight would collectively be charged about $2,300 in F.A.A. fees. But a private jet flying on that same route? Well, it would only cost them about 60 bucks. And when you zoom out, well, private jets account for about 7 percent of the flights that the F.A.A. manages, but they only account for about 0.6 percent of the fees that they collect. To understand how absurd this is, just imagine that the federal government opened a parking garage. They charge $20 for parking, except for the fanciest cars, which only have to pay $0.25. That’s essentially our current model for funding the F.A.A. Now, before we blame Congress, it’s important to understand how we got here, and then we can circle back and blame Congress. In the 1970s, aviation in the United States was booming. The government needed to fund a major expansion of airports and air traffic control. And they decided that the people who fly should pay the bill. So they created a bunch of new taxes. The biggest, by far, was a tax on tickets. Every time you buy a ticket on a commercial flight, you pay a 7.5 percent tax that goes to the F.A.A. The people on the private jets: no tickets, no tax. Now, Congress tried to make up for this inequity by slapping private jets with a much higher fuel tax, but that tax comes nowhere close to covering the F.A.A.’s full cost of managing private planes. What this means is that commercial passengers like you are providing a subsidy to the private jet set more than $1 billion per year. “This is the dining area.” Now, the private jet industry says it’s already paying more than its fair share. They point out that on a per-person basis, passengers on private jets often contribute more to the F.A.A. than passengers on commercial airlines. But the F.A.A. doesn’t manage passengers. It manages planes. And that’s exactly how it should be funded. In Canada, all planes that use the air traffic control system pay a fee based on the weight of the plane and the distance traveled. Congress should institute a similar funding model for the F.A.A. Rarely is there such a straightforward opportunity to prove that you’re fighting for the middle class. So, Congress, are you going to ride with them? Or with us?