There are about 45.000 flights a day [1] in the US or 16 million a year, and that's just commercial, not including GA the 2010 dataset [2] is the newest I could find, it assumes 1/3rd for commercial, 1/3rd charters and the rest for GA, military and cargo, and I assume that this ratio has been roughly the same in the last decades.
So, a surcharge of 100 dollars per flight to fund FAA controllers would lead to a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year while only adding less than 50 cents in ticket costs per passenger (assuming an average of 200 people per flight). Further income could be made with a lower surcharge for cargo and charters (let's say 50 dollars), and a very small one (let's say 10 dollars) for GA - assuming the above roughly 1/3rd split, you'd have an additional 800 million dollars from charters and cargo, and 160 million from GA, leading to a total of about 2.6 billion dollars.
Increase the fees to 200 dollars for commercial flights and you'd get 4.2 billion dollars - an about 20% increase of the FAA's current 19.8 billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even the most price-sensitive, high frequency fliers will not really feel. Assuming some rich executive flying twice a day for 250 working days a year, he'd pay 1000$ more in travel costs, a tiiiiny fraction of his expenses. A hobbyist pilot with his PPL needs a minimum of 24 hours and a checkride every two years, so ~12 flights per year, so their FAA surcharge cost would be around ~120 dollars a year - not very much compared to the cost of getting and maintaining a PPL.
In the end, the whining is pointless (especially as I've shown the actual impact is negligible). Either the government subsidizes air traffic of all kinds (similar as it does for road and to a lesser extent rail traffic) and distributes the cost across all members of society, or it makes for a self-sufficient system, or a mix of both - but the status quo of keeping it on life support is no longer sustainable.
Personally, I'd prefer a self-funding mechanism, alone because governments (not just in the US, it's just most pronounced there) seem to be completely incapable of actually governing, and preferring to cut costs even where it's actually life-critical.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers
[2] https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/
[3] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/F...
> A hobbyist pilot with his PPL needs a minimum of 24 hours and a checkride every two years
Citation needed on the first part. (The second part is also not a checkride, but rather a biennial flight review, for which a checkride will replace the need for, but a BFR will suffice.)
I went by the PPL(A) requirements in Europe [1, lower half of page 2] - and gotta correct myself, it's only 12 hours flight time (with 12 starts/lands, so at least 12 separate flights of at least an hour length) plus a 1h checkride in the 12 months prior to expiry (every 24 months).
Since the PPL is ICAO regulated, it should be the same case in the US.
[1] https://www.sachsen-anhalt.de/fileadmin/Bibliothek/Politik_u...
It is not the same in the US. The only currency requirements for Part 91 (private) aviation per the FARs are the landing currency requirements (only needed for carrying passengers), IFR currency [if intending to fly IFR], and the BFR.
Landing and IFR currency: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/61.57
BFR: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/61.56
So per your second link, our laws match, only that instead of the checkride we have to do in Europe, you have 1h of "ground training" review with a qualified person?
You have to have an instructor willing to gamble his ticket on you not crashing stupidly.
Other than that, there’s no minimum hour requirement.
> Personally, I'd prefer a self-funding mechanism, alone because governments (not just in the US, it's just most pronounced there) seem to be completely incapable of actually governing, and preferring to cut costs even where it's actually life-critical.
The FAA is in fact a part of the US government, which self-funds its operations via taxes, such as the surcharge you've just suggested (and if you ever look at your flight tickets past the airport codes and flight times, you might notice that passengers already pay several taxes that fund the Department of Transportation and airports themselves).
With "self-funding" I mean a mechanism that does not depend at all on broken politics to pass budgets.
..., but can lead to inefficiencies and capture.