Comment on When Americans Fly Economy, They're Actually Paying for Someone Else to Fly Private
spongebue@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
As a percentage of the total weight of a plane, passengers and their luggage constitute a much larger percentage of a commercial flight than a private one. So they are “more utilized” than a private jet, and can spread that cost over all their passengers.
Also, larger planes that fly longer distances cross more ATC zones, using up more ATC resources. They also take up more “room” in the sky, as e.g. ATC needs to leave more room for jet wash behind a heavy. So it makes sense from multiple perspectives that bigger planes pay more.
You also have to consider hobby pilots. Charging them the same amount as a 747 would be insane.
So it’s a tradeoff: the Canadian system makes smaller planes pay more, proportionally, than a per-ticket model; but not so much more that it harms the smallest personal planes.
It’s also just simpler. Personal plane? Private jet? Commercial passenger flight? Cargo plane? Same calculation for all of them.
(Yes, you could try to make it “only for flights with paid passengers”, but then pilots of private jets would all of a sudden have a lot of very rich friends with whom they do a lot of personal flying. It’s just so much easier if there’s nothing subjective about it.)
pennomi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
DrunkEngineer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.