Pays For Magazine Ad, Plans To Send Letters

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association is appealing to the heads of Fortune 1000 companies in its fight against user fees.

AOPA President Phil Boyer (right) plans to send a note to each one of those powerful executives, explaining why the user fee funding system proposed by the airlines and the FAA would increase their operating costs and harm their business.

Some of their companies have revenues that exceed the gross domestic products of 85 percent of the world's nations... so they have some pull in American politics. Nearly all of them rely on general aviation for travel, as well, and some of them are even pilots.

"Don't buy the rhetoric of those who would turn over our nation's aviation dominance from government control to the highest private bidder," Boyer wrote. "Both the FAA and the airlines would like to... place a greater financial burden on non-airline operations; or in basic terms pass along their costs to corporate aviation."

Boyer also says the thought of giving the airlines control of the nation's aviation infrastructure is frightening... after all, he says, those carriers have trouble enough running their own airlines.

The letter is in response to an article in a corporate trade publication, written by Robert Poole, favoring the airlines taking over ATC functions. The magazine wouldn't give AOPA equal space to respond... so the group bought a full-page ad in the magazine, to explain its position.

"Contrary to Poole's assertion, it is also a system that works: A combination of 31 major hub airports that handle 70 percent of all airline passengers and 5,400 community airports that allow companies like yours to use smaller and more efficient general aviation aircraft to transport goods, personnel, and services to the rest of the country," Boyer wrote in the "Executive Alert" advertisement, which the group plans to send to Fortune 1000 CEOs.

Alas, AOPA also says Poole may not understand aviation and the people who fly as well as he thinks. He concluded his article by telling the CEOs, "Don't let your chauffeurs -- the corporate flight department -- speak for you."

Wonder if he has any idea of how many CEOs and other top executives are pilots and fly their own aircraft?

FMI: www.aopa.org