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.
They weren’t saying the tax should be levied per passenger, only that the tax structure as it stands probably already scales well if you calculate per passenger.
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.
Per-passenger is a stupid way to charge this tax because the service provided is per-plane.
The math in this video checks out, even when spreading the costs over all the passengers of a larger plane.
A lot of the FAA fee is used to fund the various airport facilities, so yes it does make sense to charge on per-passenger basis.
They weren’t saying the tax should be levied per passenger, only that the tax structure as it stands probably already scales well if you calculate per passenger.
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.