Pilot's Political Orientation

"Judah" wrote in message
...

The Airline pilot, who flies back and forth across the country twice a
day, uses 100 hours of ATC time in about a week.


Oh, I think you're a bit high there.



If I remember correctly (as quoted by the AOPA) there are
about 250,000 100-hour per year GA planes.


AOPA puts the general aviation fleet at about 205,000 aircraft, and the
average time per aircraft per year at 144 hours.



There are equally as many 100-hour per week Airlines.


Oh, no, it's not even close to that. AOPA puts the airline share of the
215,000 strong civil US fleet at 4%, that would be about 8600 aircraft.



The only real way to fairly and equitably split the cost of the system is
to charge for the time used. It is probably not really practical to do
that for a variety of reasons. But gas consumption probably delivers a
good measure of time a plane spends in the air, and as such using the
system, it is probably a fairly good place to put the tax to cover that
cost.


What makes that fair? The system wasn't created to serve general aviation,
it was created to serve the airlines. If general aviation didn't exist the
system would still be needed to serve the airlines and it wouldn't be much
smaller than it is now.