Ehhhh. I wasn’t very impressed with this video. For one thing, it felt more like a compilation of aviation-related clips rather than any kind of meat and potato that actually described the issue.
When they finally did, they started with the parking ramp analogy. If that truly is a good analogy, it’s not so much that a “fancy” car would pay less, it’s that a smaller car would. Pretty much any parking lot, ferry, etc that can hold different sizes of cars will charge more for a bus or semi truck than a regular car.
They also mention that fuel taxes are higher for small planes. I would love to know more about that, because that really could smooth things over but there aren’t really any details (also $2400 for [let’s just say] a 150-passenger 737 vs $60 for a private jet may scale similarly per passenger)
Finally, they very briefly bring up how Canada’s system is much better because it uses a factor of weight and distance… Wouldn’t that just mean those giant airliners pay more?!?
Bonus: let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that American Airlines is public transit. It’s still a for-profit corporation and if you lower a plane’s FAA taxes, it’ll directly benefit them.
The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn’t put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)
So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.
Ehhhh. I wasn’t very impressed with this video. For one thing, it felt more like a compilation of aviation-related clips rather than any kind of meat and potato that actually described the issue.
When they finally did, they started with the parking ramp analogy. If that truly is a good analogy, it’s not so much that a “fancy” car would pay less, it’s that a smaller car would. Pretty much any parking lot, ferry, etc that can hold different sizes of cars will charge more for a bus or semi truck than a regular car.
They also mention that fuel taxes are higher for small planes. I would love to know more about that, because that really could smooth things over but there aren’t really any details (also $2400 for [let’s just say] a 150-passenger 737 vs $60 for a private jet may scale similarly per passenger)
Finally, they very briefly bring up how Canada’s system is much better because it uses a factor of weight and distance… Wouldn’t that just mean those giant airliners pay more?!?
Bonus: let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that American Airlines is public transit. It’s still a for-profit corporation and if you lower a plane’s FAA taxes, it’ll directly benefit them.
The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn’t put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)
So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.