Or cut down on flights. You could easily ban private flights until there is enough capacity.

Don't ban. Tax. Never ban.

Tax low capacity flights more. That both reduces the number of flights and raises money which can be put toward paying ATCs more and increasing the headcount.

You then have a lever available to dial up and down to further reduce flights / raise money.

Banning is expensive and increases legislative and judicial burden.

Taxing is a much more efficient way to stop people doing things.

You have to be careful not to only lock the poorest in society out while the rich enjoy carrying on regardless, but in the case of low capacity private jets, I don't think that's a significant problem.

If the tax doesn't put off people enough, just raise it more until either it does start to dampen demand or you're raising so much money through it you no longer care and have a new revenue stream to spend on fixing whatever problems they're causing.

Careless and hamfisted taxing/banning of "private jets" can have the unintended effect of also killing light piston general aviation, flight instruction, and the whole pipeline of training the next generation of airline pilots. Flight training is almost always low capacity (one-on-one) so uncarefuly-crafted legislation could catch it in the blast radius. Piloting is already one of the more expensive careers to train for.

You can make taxes specific, as in literally saying "a tax on non-commercially operated non-propeller driven aircraft with greater than 8 passenger seats".

The prop exemption alone would clear most gen-av, but this kind of ruleset would also be very easy for the richies to bypass/game.

You could use max gross weight and/or number of seats > 6. Not a lot of flight training or hobbyist flying going on in Beechcraft 18s or Cessna 402s. And people who like private jets aren't going to step down to a 6 seater.

Newsflash: "planes are rich people's toys" has been killing general aviation already for a generation if not two.

The rising costs have made that much more true, though. My step-dad had a gorgeous 1940s Luscombe that he paid ~35k for in the 90s. He lived in an airpark where he paid 280k for a nice 3br house with a hangar.

Good luck trying to replicate that now.

Having 85k of purely discretionary income (adjusting for inflation) is still pretty "rich people toy". That's about 105% median household income.

He had to get a loan for it, he didn't have that out of pocket.

And an upper-mid car is not by any means beyond the reach of many regular working class people.

I mean, 85k ain't that much different from a "middle. Luxury" car these days. You can definitely customize a Tesla and come out over 85k easily. Cyber trucks *stsrt" at 80k.

Im sure that person could have paid out of pocket. But I doubt he did.

Landing fees already have this built into the structure, along with waived fees for fuel purchases, etc.

It probably is reasonable to look at occupancy percentage along with engine type, and adjust landing fees based on that. Two out of 18 souls on board with a turbine? High landing fees, divert some to an ATC fund.

> Two out of 18 souls on board with a turbine?

Very common. How do you think pilots train to fly such aircraft? Would you prefer pilots not to be trained, or for this type of aircraft to cease service?

I would expect them to do the bulk of their training flights out of airports with minimal congestion and lower landing fees.

They don’t have to be trained in class B airspace to get their type rating.

Instead we allow private jet owners to fully write off the cost of a jet purchase(new or used) in the first year on their taxes. Can't even do that with a normal sized car.

Source: https://nbaa.org/flight-department-administration/tax-issues...

"Bonus depreciation" exists for cars too, but is capped around $20k. From quick reading, seems like the bonus depreciation for planes was a tax break to incentivize people to, well, buy more planes.

I fear this would only exacerbate the problem of carriers selling more tickets than there are seats.

1000 times this. Fly as much as one can safely, not more.

Exactly. The article enumerates all the ways to improve hiring, except for compensation.

With so many billionaires, the country certainly can afford paying more to people whose tasks are crucial for others' lives.

The reason there are so many people worth $1b instead of a poor $100m is because of the tax cuts diverting money from crucial jobs.

Waiting for the first trillionaire, that's when all billionaires will unanimously say "we have enough, let's start paying people more".

In the 1880s, Vanderbilt was worth $230m, or $7b today

1910s Rockerfeller peaked at nearly $1b. That's $33b today, or chump change. He, like Gates after him, gave away a lot of wealth.

Come 1995, Bill Gates took the mantle with a net worth of $15b, or $31b today.

So from 1910 to 1995 there was very little inflation in the super rich.

By 2000 Gates reached $60b ($110b). By 2010 he'd dropped to $56b ($81b today), still nearly 3 times richer than Rockerfeller

By 2015 he'd recovered to $105b in today's money, despite giving away lots of money.

In 2018 Bezos took over with $140b, a 40% real-terms increase on the "richest person" in just 3 years.

2022 Musk took over with $236b, but lost out to Arnault in 2024 when Musk was worth a mere $210b, but today he's nearly doubled his wealth. Maybe Musk is a special case due to the excessive corruption, but Bezos has increased 30% in 12 months.

in the last 30 years, the inflation rate of super-rich-wealth has increased on average 10% a year even ignoring the Musk outlier. Inflation meanwhile was 2.5%

At those rates, in the next 30 years the super-rich will be worth $4.2 trillion, but someone more normal with a net worth of $1m will be worth $2m.