Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine

Bloomberg News is a controversial New York-based international news agency which, since its founding in 1990, has repeatedly been embroiled in lawsuits alleging libel and dereliction of journalistic standards.

On 20 September 2022, Bloomberg News published an article titled “American Air CEO Wants Rockets, Private Jets to Help Fund FAA” in which the news agency circuitously maligned business aviation, insinuating operators of business aircraft fail to pay appropriately for their use of the global aviation system and air traffic control infrastructure.

Echoing the ignorance and abject bias of American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, the Bloomberg article posited: “Companies launching rockets and satellite payloads, along with private jet operators need to pay—or pay more—to fund the nation’s monitoring grid for flights.” Bloomberg further reported that Isom, speaking to the subject of the upcoming FAA reauthorization debate, had gone on to say: “Airspace is going to be a critical, critical issue. The only ones that pay for that are the airlines. Commercial airlines are paying FAA and ATC for all these other things.”

In a sapient and measured written response to the Bloomberg article, NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen asserted that Isom’s statement “fails the credibility test with experts the world over because the costs for our aviation system aren’t determined by a small airplane crossing an air traffic controller’s radar screen over Kansas at midnight, but are instead driven by the demands of the airlines’ costly hub-and-spoke network.”

That the CEO of the world’s largest airline would conflate the immense workload his company places on global airspace and air traffic systems with the comparatively insignificant comings and goings of business aircraft is analogous to the Union Pacific Railroad alleging bicyclists ought pay a significant share of railway upkeep on account of they occasionally pedal through railroad crossings.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 madness and the nadir of modern air travel, American Airlines’ in-service fleet of 873 aircraft logged approximately 2,858,400 flight-hours, during which they transported around 95-million passengers and 167-million-pounds of cargo to destinations worldwide. Contrariwise, the global fleet of Gulfstream G650s—of which the 500th was delivered on 26 September 2022—flies an average of only 450-hours per airplane per year. That’s a grand-total of 225,000 fleet hours—about 7.87% of what American Airlines flew during its worst year in history.

FMI: www.nbaa.org