SPACE!….Ross Douthat suggests that any conservatives foolish enough to support Newt Gingrich as chair of the RNC ought to reread the list of fabulous new ideas for the Republican Party that he published in Human Events last May. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I went back and refreshed my memory anyway. Here’s one of Newt’s suggestions for GOP revival:
Implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system. The problems of the Federal Aviation Administration are symptoms of a union-dominated bureaucracy resisting change. If we implemented a space-based GPS-style air traffic system we would get 40% more air travel with one-half the bureaucrats. The union has stopped 200,000,000 passengers from enjoying more reliable air travel to protect 7,000 obsolete jobs. This real change would allow the millions of frustrated travelers to have champions in congress trying to help them get places better, safer, faster.
Now, Newt loves anything space-based, and he loves to bash unions too, so this is right up his alley. But what’s the deal with this space-based air traffic control system, anyway?
Well, it turns out that it’s been on the drawing board for a while. The underlying technology is called ADS-B and has apparently worked well in tests in Alaska and other countries. Last year the FAA awarded a contract for part of a GPS-based system to ITT, but not much has been done since then. The entire project is known as NextGen, and according to this AP dispatch from last month, the real opposition to it comes not from the unions, which are skeptical but apparently not dead set against it, but from the airlines themselves, which don’t want to bear the cost of upgrading their planes.
I guess this might be more than you wanted to know about this, but hey — I was curious. It was one of Newt’s Top Nine ideas, after all. In the end, though, it turns out that the story is fairly prosaic: a GPS-based air-traffic control system might be a very fine thing that would save fuel and allow more air traffic, but it would cost a lot of money, be extremely complex to implement, has some technical issues to overcome, and faces some modest opposition from entrenched interest groups, including both airlines and the air traffic controllers union. In other words, just your standard gigantic federal technology project.
And, perhaps, just the thing to throw into a trillion dollar stimulus bill. Who knows? But part of the rebirth of the Republican Party. I’m thinking probably not.
UPDATE: By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal has a story about this exact subject today. No mention of union opposition at all. You can read it here if you want the latest.
