Privatization of the FAA

To the Editor: 
Publisher Art Hall has an issue with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He believes that privatizing our aviation system will result in more efficiency through competition. 
He uses a garden-variety “argument” of the necessity of building a better mousetrap to avoid market extinction, as well as the evolution of improvements of televisions and telephones. If only things were so simple in the land of milk and honey.
As with trickle-down/supply-side economics and environmental stewardship, which beguile the faithful who cannot decide their two gods, we need some cleaner reasoning. If one has ever watched one of those “American Greed” marathons or read about hedge funds, the dot-com disaster, or the unending examples of “Enrons,” they will quickly realize that American business has sometimes been exceptional in very wrong ways.
Waste in private organizations is often concealed intentionally through the phalanx of corporate lawyers, takeovers, and shredding of documents. Americans watch way too much television and cell phones have made us zombies, proving that technology does not always generate the best outcome for society.
Despite my concern with the sometimes questionable use of statistics, while I was employed at FAA, and the hierarchical class system of management that exists both locally at the Tech Center and in DC, the FAA has an incredible record of innovation in managing the most complex airspace system, at least in this solar system.
An MIT professor once calculated that to achieve an expectation of one fatal flight, one would have to fly 19,000 years every day. Modernization of the airspace, fire retardant material, and even mixtures of materials to safely slow down planes overrunning landing strips near water bodies are but three of thousands of improvements made by FAA and its contractors since the Wright brothers. Even the more politically conservative employees know this.
Compare the safety record of the aviation system and auto travel. Any systems engineer, statistician, operation researcher, or physicist knows these things and more.
In fact, quality control training and the science of operations research uses the aviation system as a gold standard example of safety, reliability, precision, and efficiency. Unfortunately, those with a political agenda are never dissuaded by facts, but rather rely on faulty arguments or spin.