NBAA News Bureau
AOPA’s Boyer Says General Aviation Won’t Be Divided in User Fee Fight
ATLANTA, GA, September 26, 2007 – Phil Boyer, president and CEO of the 412,000-strong Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), said he was making his third appearance today in 18 years as head of AOPA at a National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) Annual Meeting & Convention to reinforce the two organizations’ shared opposition to user fees as a dire threat to the future of general aviation.
“The airlines have been trying to tell us ‘we’re not touching you little guys,’” Boyer told an audience of NBAA Members at the NBAA User Fee Panel in the Georgia World Congress Center. The airlines’ plan would exempt piston-engine aircraft from user fees.
Despite this attempt to “divide and conquer” by the airlines, Boyer said he and NBAA President and CEO Ed Bolen are “joined at the hip” in working with a nationwide coalition of groups and individuals who recognize the need to beat back attempts at imposing user fees on the U.S. aviation system.
The leader of AOPA spoke at a panel discussion with Bolen and Selena Shilad, executive director of the Alliance for Aviation Across America, whose 3,600 members include AOPA and NBAA, about the legislative battle to fund, or “reauthorize,” the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) without resorting to user fees.
Boyer said the airlines “divide and conquer” strategy to keep AOPA’s membership from joining forces with the business aviation community, including NBAA’s 8,000 Member Companies, mistakenly assumed “our core members all fly single-engine piston airplanes.”
The fact is that today about a third of all AOPA members either fly a turbine or are studying or training to fly turbine aircraft, Boyer said, adding that what the airlines are proposing would lead to the decline of general aviation in the United States.
He said the airlines have been trying to convince his members that this is “just a small little $25 user fee.” But “we’ve seen what has happened in Europe and other places when you go down that road - general aviation disappears.”
That’s because along with the shift from taxes to fees comes a governing board of users that is naturally dominated by the airlines, who “make decisions that benefit themselves, not general aviation.”
For this reason, “we describe this as the ‘camel’s nose under the tent,’“ Boyer said.
The nationwide coalition that the two aviation organizations support, Alliance for Aviation Across America, “represents the many different groups and communities that depend on general aviation,” said Shilad. Since its launch last April, the alliance has attracted such diverse organizations as the National Farmers Union, National Association of State Aviation Officials, League of Rural Voters, National Grange, Experimental Aircraft Association and Helicopter Association International, representing thousands of members.
These groups and individuals together “represent a huge outpouring of support around the country” for retaining the current fuel tax system to pay for air transportation system improvements, she said.
NBAA’s Bolen introduced the panel and described the extensive campaign the big airlines have been waging for more than 18 months to “vilify business aviation” and “distort the truth” through paid advertising and aggressive media efforts that one Capitol Hill publication recently said has cost the airlines’ major trade group, the Air Transport Association, over $11 million in the past seven months alone.
“The airlines have tried to blame general aviation for delays, and to convince passengers that they have a dog in this fight, if you can believe that,” Bolen said.
The fact is that the Department of Transportation data shows that delays are caused by weather and the airlines’ own practices. “General aviation is never mentioned at all,” he said.
As for airlines’ attempt to distort the costs imposed by general aviation, Bolen said, “if general aviation was grounded tomorrow, the system might be 7, 8, 9 percent less expensive than it is now. And general aviation already pays 8.3 percent into the system.”
In spite of all of these attempts by the airlines to misrepresent the facts, Bolen told the audience that today, the House has passed its bill (HR 2881), one that will provide for system modernization with increases in the simple, efficient fuel tax, and without user fees.
And so far, the airlines’ effort to get a final bill through the Senate containing user fees hasn’t succeeded. “A lot of people are encouraged,” Bolen said, that after all the time and money the airlines have spent, “we’re still standing.”
Bolen cautioned against premature optimism, using an aviation analogy, “we’re in terminal airspace with a lot of convective weather ahead...we are not on final approach.”
He urged all NBAA Members to get involved now, even if they have already spoken to their members of Congress, in getting out the word as to what this fight is all about.
“This fight isn’t about delays; it isn’t about fair share; and it isn’t about modernization,” he said. For the airlines, Bolen said “it’s about shifting $1.5 to $2 billion worth of costs onto someone else. That’s the story people need to know.”
To learn more about what NBAA Members can do in the fight against user fees, go to the NBAA Online Advocacy Center at www.nbaa.org/advocacycenter.
