The Problem with the FAA and Sequestration

“The world runs on individuals pursuing their self-interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.” — Milton Friedman

As lines grew at airports and passengers began to fume, Congress lumbered into action, holding hearings on furloughs and sequestration, and, ultimately tweaking the law to allow the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to add more manpower at the nation’s air traffic control towers. The only silver lining to the whole calamity may be that some small part of the government actually had a real discussion about spending. Not that it solves the underlying problem or averts mounting complaints about flying. If Congress was serious about improving air travel, they would have moved forward with plans to modernize our aviation system with new technologies that would render many of the existing towers redundant and obsolete, while allowing private entrepreneurs to play a larger role in airport management.

Airlines were deregulated in 1978, saving consumers billions of dollars and opening air travel to a much larger public. But as anyone who has flown recently knows, air travel is far less enjoyable than it was in the days of regulation and pampered passengers. It’s not just the TSA security checks; airlines have restructured their routes to keep flights as full as possible while trimming back on amenities. And airport facilities lag far behind the growing demand for air travel. In short, air travel is a no frills experience that leaves many passengers dreading the trip to the airport.

A large part of the problem is that while airlines have been deregulated, airports remain mired in red tape and bureaucratic sclerosis that make expansion and modernization difficult. The FAA relies on antiquated technologies to regulate increasingly congested skies. An upgrade is sorely needed, and the technology exists to more accurately monitor planes in the sky with significantly fewer facilities on the ground. In fact, a study by the Reason Foundation finds that over 100 air traffic control centers could be closed if new technologies are adopted for a smaller set of modern facilities that can manage flights “from anywhere-to-anywhere.” These changes would generate a one-time windfall of $1.7 billion as well as annual savings of $1 billion a year.

In addition to obsolete technologies, airport infrastructure improvement projects are hampered by bureaucratic oversight and politically powerful interests — from the air traffic controllers union, to monopolistic airlines with virtual veto power over new gates, to politicians seeking to divert federal dollars to favored projects. Delays and cost overruns plague airport improvement projects, leaving passengers in crowded and dilapidated waiting areas.

A better solution would be to harness the power of entrepreneurship by allowing the private sector to manage airport facilities and the ATC system. The deregulation that began in 1978 needs to be extended to airport facilities and air traffic control as well. The United States is a straggler in this respect, with many countries around the globe already shifting airports and airport management to private companies. From the U.K. to Australia, airports have been shifted towards private management, funded by aviation users. Canada has completely privatized its air traffic control system and is a model for other countries, including the United States. A shift to the private sector would provide access to capital markets to fund the necessary improvements that are fast outstripping the capacity of the Airport Trust Fund and the federal government’s ability to pay.

Unfortunately, the United States has a long way to go before air travel is on solid operational and financial ground. Despite the obvious flaws of the current system, the political interests that have congealed around the status quo make change difficult. Much of this can be explained by what economist Gordon Tullock called the transitional gains trap. That is, the current system bestowed substantial benefits on particular groups, such as the air traffic controllers who continue to man the control towers that would become obsolete in an upgraded system. Or the politicians who see dollars and jobs in airport improvement projects. Tullock notes that over time these benefits dissipate and the programs may become ineffective. Yet change will impose significant costs on these groups, creating a powerful coalition opposing reform.

Federal involvement in air traffic control has a long history. The 1926 Air Commerce Act tasked the Department of Commerce with issuing and enforcing air traffic rules, licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, establishing airways, and operating aids for air navigation. In the mid-1930s, the federal Bureau of Air Commerce took over the initial air traffic control centers for en route tracking created by the airlines, which complemented the operation of local control towers by municipal authorities. During the 1940s, the federal government began taking over the operation of local control towers, and following World War II all aspects of air traffic control became federal.

Airport development took a different path. In the early years of commercial aviation, some private airports (e.g., Burbank, California) existed alongside those established by state and local governments. Today, virtually all U.S. commercial airports are owned by state and local governments. The federal government's role has been to regulate and subsidize those facilities. Federal financial aid to airports began with work relief programs in the 1930s, and was followed by the Federal Airport Act of 1946, which provided $500 million in airport grants to state and local governments over seven years.

The coming of jet aircraft and the large number of aviation accidents spurred Congress to pass the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which created the Federal Aviation Administration. The new administration replaced previous federal agencies involved in air traffic control and airport development.

Congress started taxing the commercial aviation industry soon after it was established. It passed an excise tax on gasoline and aviation fuels in 1932 and an excise on airline passenger tickets in 1941. The revenue from these levies went into the federal government's general fund. That changed in 1970 when Congress passed legislation creating an Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which had dedicated streams of revenue to be used for air traffic control and federal aid to airports. Trust Fund revenue sources included ticket taxes on domestic and international flights, taxes on fuels, and various fees.

The Airport and Airway Trust Fund currently raises more than $12 billion annually from a 7.5 percent tax on domestic airline tickets, a tax on each segment flown, taxes on gasoline and jet fuel, international departure and arrival taxes, and half a dozen other fees. Trust Fund revenues pay for almost four-fifths of the FAA's $16.4 billion budget, with the balance coming from general federal funds covering the FAA's safety regulatory and miscellaneous other activities.

While air traffic control is an increasingly technology-intensive industry, labor union issues have long played an important role in the ATC system. A period of labor unrest began in the late 1960s as FAA controllers pushed for job improvements and official status as an employee union. In 1969, about 500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization stayed home "sick" causing air service interruptions. The following year, 3,000 PATCO members took part in another "sickout" or illegal strike, which caused chaos for the nation's air traffic.

Labor problems continued during the 1970s, with various work slowdowns and union protests over contract issues. Then in 1981, PATCO declared a major system-wide illegal strike after negotiations on a new contract broke down. That prompted President Ronald Reagan to order controllers to return to work within 48 hours or else face termination. More than 11,000 controllers refused to return to work and were fired by Reagan and initially banned from federal service. PATCO was dissolved and a new controllers union was created in 1987, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA).

Today, an important aspect of the federal ATC system is the high labor costs. In 2010, the operations portion of FAA had about 43,000 workers who earned a total of $6.5 billion in wages and benefits, or about $151,000 per worker. Just looking at controllers, a 2005 FAA study found that compensation packages averaged $166,000 annually. Labor costs account for two-thirds of the cost of FAA operations.

While organized labor has created management challenges for the FAA, so has the implementation of new technologies. Delays and cost overruns on major technology projects have been common. For example, the Advanced Automation System project was launched in the early 1980s and was originally expected to cost $2.5 billion and be completed by 1996. But by 1994, estimated project costs had soared to $7.6 billion and the project was seven years behind schedule. The FAA terminated some parts of the AAS program and restructured others, but $1.5 billion of spending ended up being completely wasted.

More recently, a 2005 study by the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General looked at 16 major air traffic control upgrade projects and found that the combined costs had risen from $8.9 billion to $14.5 billion. The cost of the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System project had jumped 194 percent to $2.7 billion and was seven years behind schedule. The OIG said that the STARS project was "facing obsolescence" even before it was completed. Meanwhile, the cost of the GPS controlled Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) project had jumped 274 percent to $3.3 billion and was 12 years behind schedule. A Government Accountability Office analysis in 2005 found similar cost overruns and delays in these projects.

Many experts are predicting major problems with U.S. aviation infrastructure in coming years as large demand growth outstrips the capacity of available facilities. In addition to a rising number of airline passengers, the average size of planes has fallen, which increases the number of planes in the sky that the ATC system needs to handle. On the supply side of the aviation equation, the FAA has long had problems with capital funding, high labor costs, and an inability to efficiently implement new technologies. Major changes are needed because the increased air traffic will soon bump up against the limits of the current air traffic control system.

In 1999 I received a consulting contract from the U.S. Trade and Development Agency to provide precise geodetic GPS surveys at 10 airports in Central America. The surveys were needed for the implementation of GPS navigation and approach to the airports. We were also contracted to provide training in the establishment of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for airport approach systems.

When this contract was announced at an aviation conference in Miami I gave a presentation to the audience on the purpose of the contract and what we would be providing through USTDA and with the cooperation of FAA. During the dinner I sat at a table with Jane Garvey, the then FAA Administrator and gave her a more detailed explanation of what we would be doing and how the GNSS would be a tremendous benefit to civil aviation in the region. Ms. Garvey was quick to grasp the technology and its benefits. When I asked her why the United States was not moving forward with this less labor intensive and less expensive technology her answer was simple and direct — “it’s the unions.” She explained that any new technology introduced into the ATC system had to be approved by the NATCA. The approval was not for the viability of the technology or the safety of the airways but for the impact the technology would have on the union jobs of the air controllers. This did not bother the aviation officials in Central America as they were more concerned with implementing an ATC system they could readily afford and one that would satisfy the airlines serving the region.

Virtually all commercial airports in the United States are owned by state and local governments. But around the world, airports are becoming viewed more as business enterprises, and less as monopoly public services. Governments in both developed and developing countries are turning to the private sector for airport management and development.

The benefits of a more entrepreneurial approach to running airports include increased operating efficiency, improved amenities, and more rapid and efficient expansion in capacity to reduce congestion. Airlines, passengers, private-plane owners, and taxpayers can all benefit from this new commercial approach to airport management.

For existing state and local airports, the simplest form of privatization is to contract out management of the airport on a short-term basis. But long-term leases can shift much greater responsibility and entrepreneurial incentive to the airport company, while liberating much of the city's previous investment in the airport. To create new airport facilities, the private sector can be brought in as a partner and granted either a long-term or perpetual franchise to finance, design, own, and operate the new facility. Full private ownership and management of airports is also possible and is becoming fairly common in Europe.

Airports have been fully or partly privatized in many foreign cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, Melbourne, Naples, Rome, Sydney, and Vienna. Britain led the way with the 1987 privatization of British Airports Authority, which owns Heathrow and other airports. Other countries followed with a wide range of commercialization reforms under which private firms own or operate various aspects of airport facilities.

Since 1987, more than 100 airports have been partly or fully privatized worldwide. A recent survey found that there are about 100 companies around the world that own and operate airports, finance airport privatization, or participate in projects to finance, design, build and operate new airports or airport terminals.

Many aviation experts predict serious trouble in coming years as air travel demand grows faster than the ability of the U.S. air traffic control system to expand capacity. In the 2003 reauthorization of the FAA, Congress acknowledged the seriousness of the problem by creating the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) to coordinate the transition to a Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). NextGen will be a major redesign of the ATC infrastructure, as described by the Congressional Budget Office:

“The new system is designed to accommodate up to three times the volume of current air traffic by making more efficient use of both the national airspace and airport facilities. The new air traffic control system would be more decentralized than the one currently in place in the United States. Guidance systems on planes would work in conjunction with satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to supplement direct supervision by ground-based controllers and radar stations. As a result, each plane would depend less on instructions from an air traffic controller and more on its own resources for maintaining a safe flight pattern and would be better able to adjust to the particular air traffic conditions in its vicinity.”

The JPDO has estimated that not expanding the ATC system's capacity will be costing the U.S. economy $40 billion per year by 2020 because the overburdened system will force significant rationing of flights. That rationing would increase prices and eliminate some trips entirely. To avoid this crisis, JPDO has called for restructuring the ATC system to safely and efficiently handle the heavier demand.

One problem is the mismatch between the growth in air traffic and the projected growth in FAA revenue. The FAA will need about $1 billion more per year over the next 20 years just to implement NextGen. In 2007 the FAA proposed a user-fee-based funding reform that could provide a more efficient and growing revenue source. The idea was to make each air transportation user's burden on the ATC system more closely match that entity's cost for using the system. That approach has thus far been ignored by Congress.

However, the challenge ahead for the ATC system is more complex than just financial. NextGen will be a major paradigm shift — from 20th-century (manual) air traffic control to 21st-century (semi-automated) air traffic management — and it will be more complex and riskier than any other challenge the FAA has previously attempted. Given the FAA's management and cost overrun problems in the past, simply fixing the funding problem for the ATC system without dramatically reforming its governance poses risks of larger and more dramatic failures and greater congestion down the road.

Here are three key problems with the current government-owned and operated system of air traffic control:

Inflexible Funding. Government funding sources tend to be static and subject to political considerations, and they are decoupled from changing market demands. Changes in aviation over the past decade have hurt the FAA's funding base. A large part of the FAA budget comes from aviation excise taxes, especially the 7.5 percent tax on airline tickets. As average ticket prices have fallen over time, ATC funding has been squeezed. Payroll costs of the current labor-intensive ATC system consume most of the available budget, leaving less funding for capital investment.

Making the transition to NextGen will require billions of dollars of new investments in advanced technologies. The FAA's capital budget is still focused mostly on patching up the existing system, such as replacing antiquated display consoles. Such investments are needed in the short-term, but won't add very much capacity to the system. But that is nearly all the FAA can afford under the current funding structure.

Some people argue that Congress could solve the funding problem by appropriating a larger amount of general federal revenue for the ATC system. But given the giant federal budget deficit, federal discretionary spending is going to be severely squeezed in coming years. The solution, as discussed below, is to create a commercialized ATC system that can flexibly respond to changing conditions and access private capital markets for investment.

Technology Implementation Risks. The FAA has been attempting to modernize its system, expand capacity, and increase its productivity for decades. But dozens of reports over the years from the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Transportation have faulted the FAA for poor management of major projects, which are often delayed and over budget. The Advanced Automation System, Wide Area Augmentation System, and other major projects have had large cost overruns and been years behind schedule or cancelled, as discussed above.

In 2005 two OIG researchers presented an overview of the FAA's failed efforts over the years to modernization the National Airspace System.25 In reviewing what went wrong, they concluded that FAA modernization efforts had neither reduced costs nor increased productivity:

“NAS modernization plans have been consistently subverted by requirements growth, development delays, cost escalations, and inadequate benefits management. All these things were symptomatic of the fact that FAA didn't think it needed to reduce operating costs.”

Many experts are greatly concerned that the FAA's institutional culture is poorly suited to implementing anything as dramatic as NextGen. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences convened an expert panel to assist the GAO in understanding the cultural and technical factors that have impeded previous ATC modernization efforts. It found that "the key cultural factor impeding modernization has been resistance to change, which is characteristic of FAA personnel at all levels" and that "the key technical factor affecting modernization has been a shortfall in the technical expertise needed to design, develop, or manage complex air traffic systems."

As a government agency, the FAA is not designed to judge risks, aim at the most efficient investments, manage people to produce results, reward excellence, or punish incompetence. It is therefore not equipped to fundamentally reform the ATC system. Thus, major institutional change is probably a prerequisite for implementing the advanced ATC system the nation needs to meet rising aviation demand. This echoes Jane Garvey’s comments to me in 1999.

Political Constraints. A third impediment to ATC reform is political. The redesign of the ATC system foreseen in NextGen could potentially deliver major cost savings and greatly expand ATC capacity. However, realizing those gains would require retirement of large numbers of costly radars and other ground-based navigation aids and the consolidation of ATC facilities. One current proposal would replace 21 en route centers and 171 terminal radar approach control (TRACON) facilities with just 35 air traffic service hubs in a redesign of U.S. airspace. 28 Physical control towers located at many smaller airports would gradually be phased out as "virtual tower" functions are built into the new super-hubs.

However, Congress tends to resist consolidating ATC facilities because of concerns about job losses and the like, which is similar to the political resistance to closing post offices and military bases. A major 1982 proposal for consolidating ATC facilities was quietly dropped after it became clear that getting it through Congress would be very difficult. Similarly, Congress came extremely close to forbidding the FAA's recent success in outsourcing its Flight Service Station system, which involved reducing the system from 58 facilities to 20. The prohibition was defeated only by a credible veto threat from the Bush White House. In sum, as long as ATC remains government-owned and controlled, making the needed reforms to improve efficiency and implement NextGen will be very difficult.

In 1999 and 2001 I spent a great deal of time at the FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C and in offices of Representatives Don Young (R-Alaska) the then Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and John Mica (R-Florida) the then Chairman of the Committee on Aviation. During one meeting with Rep. Young I explained what we were doing in Central America with GNSS and he was flabbergasted that he was not aware of this project. He was more annoyed that ate the current time Congress was holding hearings on the cost overruns of Lockheed-Martin’s STARS system. That’s the last I ever heard of GNSS implementation. Evidently Lockheed Martin had way more political and financial clout than one obscure consultant.

The way to address all three of these organizational problems is to take the ATC system out of the federal budget process and make it a self-supporting entity, funded directly by its customers. Variants of this commercialization approach have been recommended by a series of federal studies and commissions over the past 15 years.

As part of Vice President Al Gore's efforts at "reinventing government" in the 1990s, for example, the Clinton administration proposed turning the ATC system into a separate, self-funded, nonprofit government corporation within the Department of Transportation. The 1997 National Civil Aviation Review Commission, which was chaired by Norman Mineta, similarly proposed moving toward a self-supporting air traffic control organization.

Commercialization would entail shifting from aviation-related taxes paid to the U.S. Treasury to fees for ATC services paid directly by customers to a new self-supporting Air Traffic Organization (ATO). This change would allow fees to grow in proportion to the growth of flight activity, rather than being tied to a less-stable variable, such as fuel prices or airline ticket prices. Moreover, a predictable revenue stream that was not subject to the federal budget process would provide the basis for the ATO to issue long-term bonds for funding capital investments.

Commercialization would also address the management problems that have plagued the FAA's efforts to modernize. A non-civil-service ATO could attract the best private-sector managers and engineers skilled at implementing complex technology projects. Such an ATO could hire, fire, and compensate its employees as other high-tech businesses do. Private sector managers would have an incentive to ask tough questions about whether new investments offered real value for the money, a process that often doesn't occur at the FAA or in Congress.

In addition, a separate, self-supporting ATO—no longer part of the FAA—would be overseen at arm's length for aviation safety by the remaining FAA. Numerous studies have pointed out that the FAA's air-safety role is compromised when it comes to the ATC system, since that system is operated "in-house" by a different branch of the same FAA. All other players in aviation—pilots, mechanics, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and so forth—are regulated at arm's length for safety by the FAA. This separation of ATC operations from safety regulation is especially critical given the major changes entailed by shifting to the semi-automated NextGen, where numerous safety versus capacity questions will need to be addressed in a rigorous and transparent manner.

Finally, a self-supporting ATO would address the political obstacles to improving system efficiency, such as making decisions to close facilities. By passing the enabling legislation for ATC reform, Congress would delegate such contentious issues to the customer-oriented ATO organization.

During the past two decades, nearly 50 governments have commercialized their air traffic control systems. That means they have separated their ATC activities from their transport ministries, removed them from the civil service, and made them self-supporting from fees charged to aircraft operators. These new air navigation service providers (ANSPs) are usually regulated at arm's length by their government's aviation safety agency.

Britain's ATC system has been commercialized by means of a "public-private partnership." National Air Traffic Services (NATS) is a jointly owned company, with British airlines owning 42 percent, airport company BAA owning 4 percent, employees owning 5 percent, and the government owning the remaining minority stake. NATS is operated on a not-for-profit basis.

Canada's ATC system has been fully commercialized. In 1996, Canada set up a private, nonprofit ATC corporation, Nav Canada, which is self-supporting from charges on aviation users. The Canadian system has been widely praised for its sound finances, solid management, and its investment in new technologies.31 The Canadian system is a very good reform model for the United States to consider.

Nav Canada's corporate board is composed largely of aviation stakeholders. It has 4 seats for the airlines, 3 for the government, 2 for employees, and 1 for the non-commercial aviation industry. Those 10 stakeholders select 4 directors from outside aviation, and then those 14 select the company president, who becomes the 15th board member. To further strengthen governance, neither elected officials nor anyone connected with suppliers to Nav Canada can serve on the board. Nav Canada also has a 20-member outside Advisory Committee.

A number of studies have found that ATC commercialization has generally resulted in improvements to service quality, better management, and reduced costs. At the same time, air safety has remained the same or improved in the countries that have pursued reforms to set up independent ANSP organizations.

A thorough 2009 report by Glen McDougall and Alasdair Roberts compared the performance of 10 commercialized ATC systems and the FAA during the 1997 to 2004 period. They looked at large amounts of performance and safety data from the systems in the various countries and conducted over 200 interviews with managers, workers, and users of the different systems. The researchers found:

“ANSP commercialization has generally achieved its objectives. Service quality has improved in most cases. Several ANSPs have successfully modernized workplace technologies. The safety records of ANSPs are not adversely affected by commercialization and in some cases safety is improved. Costs are generally reduced, sometimes significantly. Other risks of commercialization—such as erosion of accountability to government, deterioration of labor relations, or worsened relationships between civil and military air traffic controllers—have not materialized.”

For the United States, a commercialized ATC organization would be more likely than the FAA to efficiently implement the major aviation infrastructure advances that the nation desperately needs. Air traffic control is more complex and dynamic than ever, and it needs to be managed in the sort of efficient and flexible manner that only a commercialized environment can offer. Countries like Canada have shown the way forward for air traffic control, and U.S. policymakers should adopt the proven organizational reforms that have been implemented abroad.

As you can see from this long report sequestration did not have a damn thing to do shutting down ATC control; towers and furloughing civil service employees. This was merely Obama’s way of creating pain for the air travelers so he could get the public behind him in his fight with Congress. It was petty, childish and mean. But like the scorpion in Alsop’s fable of he scorpion and the frog Obama was merely being a scorpion and reverting to his Saul Alinsky playbook on politics.

Air travel has become an inconvenience, and it will only get worse in the future. Congress rescued the flying public from the burden of sequestration, but has done little to address the more serious concerns about the future of aviation. The federal budget — with a debt ceiling looming and a growing entitlement problem — is hardly up to the task of bringing air travel into the 21st century. The United States should take its cue from the countries around the world that have turned to the private sector to build the air transport systems of the future. We have the technology and we have the skills. If Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras can do it we certainly can if we have the political will. Next we need to privatize the TSA!

Debunking the Truthers

“Anyone who knows how difficult it is to keep a secret among three men - particularly if they are married — knows how absurd is the idea of a worldwide secret conspiracy consciously controlling all mankind by its financial power; in real, clear analysis. — Oswald Mosley

Every detective and prosecutor knows the importance of MOM — Means, Opportunity and Motive in a criminal case. With MOM it’s difficult, if not impossible to get an arrest warrant or a conviction. While theories may be a starting point police and prosecutors need MOM along with a certain amount of forensic evidence.

The 9-11 Truthers use pseudo-science for their forensics and lack MOM in their claims that the George W. Bush, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Israelis or the owners were behind the 9-11 attacks on the on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

In my previous post, Remembering 9-11, I wrote about the timeline and my recollections of the attacks. In this post I will attempt to debunk the claims made by the Truthers. I will use information from various sources including Popular Mechanics, The History Channel, The National Geographic Channel, and my personal knowledge based on 55 years’ experience in civil and transportation engineering.

I will not attempt to debunk all claims made on the list I previously published as I believe I dealt with some of the claims about the aircraft, the steel, and the building collapse.

Claim No.1: In the months leading up to 9/11, the United States’ vaunted intelligence agencies lost track of 19 foreigners, most of whom had overstayed their visas, and could not catch up to them even though some of them were living with FBI informants and others were enrolling in flight schools where they sought to learn to fly — but not land — airplanes. They were living the high life and not showing any evidence of trying to hide. In July 2001, according to an article in Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals through the Echelon spy network that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons against important symbols of American and Israeli culture. Yet we are told the attacks came as a complete surprise. How could this happen?

Yes, the FBI and CIA screwed up. They were not talking to each other and the FBI did not take the threats from Al Qaeda seriously. John O’Neill the head of the anti-terrorist joint task force in New York was thwarted time and time again in his efforts to get intelligence on Al Qaeda. When he went to Yemen to investigate the attack on the USS Cole he was severally restricted by our Ambassador, Barbara Bodine.

Arriving in Yemen, O'Neill finds challenging field conditions. His agents confront 102-degree heat and a cramped, unsecured hotel for their quarters. O'Neill soon finds himself clashing with Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, who is concerned about the number of FBI agents and military personnel flooding into the country after the bombing. O'Neill argues that the FBI needs resources to thoroughly investigate the attack. Bodine has different priorities, including maintaining good relations with Yemen. "I had to act as a cultural interpreter. They have endured first British colonialism, and then the Soviets. These people have only had foreigners telling them what to do. Now O'Neill and his men were coming in, doing essentially the same thing," Bodine later told Britain's The Sunday Times.

As relations between the two sour, the number of topics they disagree on multiplies. O'Neill wants a heavily-armed security presence; Bodine wants the agents to be unarmed. O'Neill wants to have direct access to Yemeni officials; Bodine feels she should supervise encounters. As O'Neill starts to seek support from Barry Mawn and other FBI officials back in the U.S., the cables sent by Bodine to the State Department become increasingly critical of O'Neill. It reaches the point where Louis Freeh and Janet Reno become personally involved in the dispute.

After numerous bureaucratic fights with his superiors in the FBI O’Neill resigns from the FBI and takes on the job of chief of security at the World Trade Center. O’Neill lost his life on 9-11 saving the lives of others.

After the Khobar Towers Bombing, Dharan, Saudi Arabia, a blast kills 19 American soldiers and injures 500 others. At first bin Laden is a suspect, but U.S. officials later conclude the plotters were probably linked to the Iranian government.

Both O'Neill and FBI Director Louis Freeh are directly involved in the investigation. They travel to Saudi Arabia where they reportedly disagree on whether the Saudis are cooperating. According to FBI lore, O'Neill tells Freeh bluntly that the Saudis were "blowing smoke up your ass." Whether the story's true or not, O'Neill's friend and ABC News producer, Chris Isham confirms that O'Neill was frustrated with the investigation. "He felt the Saudis were definitely playing games and that the senior officials in the U.S. government, including Louis Freeh, just didn't get it." The movie “The Kingdom” is loosely based on this event.

After numerous bureaucratic fights with his superiors in the FBI O’Neill resigns from the FBI and takes on the job of chief of security at the World Trade Center. O’Neill lost his life on 9-11 saving the lives of others.

From an article published in December, 2009 by The Reason (a publication of the Reason Foundation) Jeff Taylor writes:

“For years federal authorities have argued that antiquated laws kept the cops from stopping 9/11. They said the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks demonstrated the need for the PATRIOT Act and every other proposed expansion of the government’s surveillance powers. But in testimony before Congress in September, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell changed tack, saying “9/11 should have and could have been prevented” after all; the authorities simply “didn’t connect the dots.”

McConnell did not draw the obvious conclusion: If greater federal power was not needed pre-9/11 to stop terrorists, then even more federal authority is not needed now. Instead, McConnell argued that the Protect America Act—which allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, without judicial oversight, to authorize surveillance of international phone calls and email involving people in the U.S.—made vitally needed changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

How does the supposed need for greater surveillance power square with McConnell’s declaration that 9/11 was preventable and his lament that “we didn’t connect the dots”? How did we get the dots without the Protect America Act?

Via good old-fashioned police work that top officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored. Federal agents on the ground knew that hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi had sought pilot training. They knew Zacarias Mous­saoui had sought the same sort of training; he was carrying 747 manuals when he was picked up on immigration charges. In the days leading up to 9/11, Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit repeatedly tried to obtain permission to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer and belongings. Headquarters refused to seek a warrant.

New details on just how costly that denial proved to be were first published in a widely overlooked September 10 story by Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington reporter. Gordon discovered that the FBI had enough information to arrest part of Al Qaeda’s financing network in the days before 9/11—information that could have stopped the hijackings. Cue McConnell’s dots.

Moussaoui’s fellow jihadists considered him a loose cannon and security risk. They were right: The key to the whole network was right there in his notebooks. Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Binalshibh wired $14,000 to Moussaoui in August 2001, and Moussaoui sloppily recorded the routing number.

But authorities never looked at that notebook. Instead, FBI brass rejected Agent Samit’s attempts to search Moussaoui’s belongings, citing lack of information that Moussaoui was a known terrorist or foreign agent. The notebooks were not searched until after the attacks.

Gordon notes that investigators almost certainly could have traced Moussaoui’s money back to an Al Qaeda moneyman in Dubai; Binalshibh’s transactions would have led them there. The Dubai contact used one of his Western Union receipts to jot down a phone number in the United Arab Emirates. That number received calls from 9/11 hijackers while they were living in Florida prior to their attack.

As Gordon reports, FBI agents at Moussaoui’s trial testified that had he confessed to the plot after his August 16 arrest on immigration charges, thus giving them access to his notebooks pre-9/11, they could have moved on 11 of the 19 hijackers. But Washington steadfastly refused to move on information developed from the field offices. Rather than endlessly tweaking the intelligence-gathering statutes, the White House should have spent the past six years addressing the “obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism” that Samit cited as the roadblock in his investigation. It obviously has not.”

Another report in the Washington Post states:

“The inability to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking plot amounts to a "significant failure" by the FBI and was caused in large part by "widespread and longstanding deficiencies" in the way the agency handled terrorism and intelligence cases, according to a report released yesterday.

In one particularly notable finding, the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded that the FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers -- Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar -- after they first entered the United States in early 2000.

"While we do not know what would have happened had the FBI learned sooner or pursued its investigation more aggressively, the FBI lost several important opportunities to find Hazmi and Mihdhar before the September 11 attacks," the report said.”

Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who served as a member of the Sept. 11 panel, said the "litany of reports" documenting FBI problems in recent months "has to be a wake-up call" for Director Robert S. Mueller III and other FBI officials.

"I think they believe they have made significant progress, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done," she said. This is the same Jamie Gorelick, who as a member of the Clinton administration built the wall between the FBI and the CIA. She served on he board of Fannie May and walked away with millions due to the housing bubble collapse. It was her policies that got us into this mess and then she serves on the 9-11 Commission. She walked away richer and blameless, that’s how Washington D.C. works.

The Washington Post report continues:

“Although the memo from Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams was proposed as "a theory rather than a warning or a threat," the report concludes that the bureau "failed to fully evaluate, investigate, exploit and disseminate information related to" the memo because of shortcomings in the way its analysis and intelligence programs were set up and run. "Even though it did not contain an immediate warning and was marked routine, Williams's information and theory warranted strategic analysis from the FBI," the report says.

Fine's conclusions about Moussaoui are less clear, because most references to the case have been blacked out by court order. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who is presiding over Moussaoui's prosecution in Alexandria, blocked release of the full report because of objections from defense attorneys.

Some hints of Fine's conclusions are still evident in the censored version of the report, however. In one paragraph that clearly pertains to the Moussaoui case, the report says agents "did not receive adequate support from the field office or from FBI headquarters" and criticizes the FBI for "disjointed and inadequate review" of requests for secret warrants.”

This is not evidence of a conspiracy, it’s sloppy and bureaucratic police work by a bunch of people in the Justice Department who just want to cover their behinds and protect their careers.

Claim No. 2: Two days before the 9/11 attacks, the “Lion of Panjshir,” Ahmad Shah Massoud Khayin, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, was assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as journalists. In the early morning hours of Sept. 11, a van occupied by Middle Eastern men pulled up to The Colony Beach and Tennis Resort in Florida, where Bush was staying. They said they were there to interview the President, but didn’t have an appointment. They were turned away. Are these two incidents related?

What do these two events have to do with 9-11? Massoud Khayin’s assassination by a suicide bomber, who had hidden a bomb in his TV camera, was directed by bin Laden as a pay-back to the Taliban. There is no credible evidence of the van of reporters at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort. If so were hey here to assassinate George W. Bush. Why would Bush allow his own murder?

Claim No. 3: At 8:44 a.m., during a working breakfast on missile defense with Congressional leaders, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted a terrorist attack would come, saying, “Let me tell you. I’ve been around the block a few times. There will be another event.” Did he know about the attack in advance?

A lot of people were predicting terrorist attacks including the FBI, CIA, MI-6 and the German BND. After all that had been happening the past 5 or 6 years my German shepherd knew an attack was coming. This is just a libel against the hated Rumsfeld from the left-wing wingnuts. It probably was a coincidence that Rumsfeld made this remark 30 minutes prior to the first plane striking the WTC. As Sigmund Freud said; “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Claim No. 4: How did that passport of Satam al-Suqami survive the crash? The plane was exploded into a giant fireball upon impact with WTC 1. Yet the passport exited his pocket or luggage and fell unharmed to the ground near the tower, where it was spotted by a passerby and turned over to police despite the bedlam going on all around? How is it that his was the only identification found out of all the passengers on the plane?

In a recent article in the History Club Magazine Michael Graves, an eye witness to the events at Ground Zero writes:

“Instead, I saw what appeared to be a 737 as it came into view from behind the Bankers' Trust Building. It banked to the left and was just screaming, making a sound that reminded me of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels tracing overhead at low altitude. In an instant, the plane slammed into 2 WTC, nearly immediately above us. I was astonished at the visual impression it left: It hadn't crashed into 2 WTC, it had crashed through it. Between the two towers, we could make out the unmistakable shape of a piece of the nose/ cockpit section of the plane arcing toward the ground, several blocks away.

For an instant, there was a neat, clean hole in the side of 2 WTC, about two thirds of the way up: long, narrow slits at approximately 45 degrees where the wings had hit, and a large circle in the center where the fuselage had entered. A second later, that section of the building exploded in a ball of flame, smoke, and flying metal and glass. We could see the shapes of two people who'd been blown out of the building and we're falling toward us.

We had watched the airplane plow into the building in stunned silence. Now as the building erupted in flame, the crowd around me erupted into complete panic. The earlier debris was nothing compared to what was raining down now. Everyone nearby ran headlong from the area, trying to get away before the flaming carnage landed in the street. The sheer size of the building provided a window of safety; I made it to the corner of Liberty and West Streets, and perhaps another 20 yards southeast on West before I heard the thundering crash on the street around the comer. Two more people lay in the street near the intersection of West and Liberty. Across the street, a police officer was being treated for wounds to his head. The front of his blue shirt was covered with blood

I was incredulous. They're trying to kill us, I thought. I'm living in a Tom Clancy novel. Feeling as though I were out of imminent danger, my mind began to process what I'd just seen. ''What the hell was that" asked a man walking nearby. "It was an airplane. It looked like a Continental 737," I said. As it turned out I was wrong on both counts-it was a United 757 [Sic].

I continued south on West Street to the end of the block, where I crossed to the west on Albany Street. Here large numbers of emergency and law-enforcement vehicles were coming down West Street from both directions, stopping right about where I crossed to avoid falling debris. There were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the street. Ambulances could only crawl down West Street. I had crossed West and made it a half a block down Albany when the crowd was electrified again by the sound of approaching aircraft. As everyone dashed for whatever cover they could find, a pair off-16 fighter jets roared directly overhead, at approximately 1,500 feet (they seemed just high enough to easily clear the twin towers). The jets started a semi-circle around the burning buildings, and a collective sigh of relief went up from the crowd.”

As Mr. Graves reports that debris were being thrown out of the plane and building why wouldn’t the passport of Satam Al Suqami be thrown out of American Flight 11. Did some nefarious FBI agent travel to New York with Al Suqami’s passport and plant it among the debris? Give me a break! If you believe that one I have a bridge in New York I can sell you at a good price.

Claim No. 5: At 8:50 a.m., four minutes after the first plane struck, Tenet was made aware of the crash and realized it was no accident. Yet there is no indication he made an effort to stop Bush from making a scheduled appearance at Booker Elementary School in Florida, despite the danger he may have been facing were a highly coordinated attack being carried out. Before entering the classroom, Bush paused to speak with then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Later, Bush said he learned of the first crash before entering the classroom when he saw the plane crash into the building on television. There was no video of the first crash until much later in the day, and the school principal said there was no television in the area that Bush could have seen anyway. Why this discrepancy? Was Bush lying?

I realized it was no accident when I saw the first images and I was 3,000 miles away. The report that Bush learned of the attack before entering he classroom is false. If you watch the video of him in the classroom you will Andy Card walk in a whisper in his ear that a plane had crashed into he building. He returned a few minutes later and told the President another plane had hit the WTC. What was Bush to do, tell the first graders we were under attack from terrorist and scare the bejabbers out of them? No, he calmly walked out of the classroom and made a brief statement after he had gotten enough facts to do so. Did he lie, no, it’s Loose Change doing the lying.

Claim No. 5: Witnesses reported seeing a white jet that looked like a fighter plane trailing United Airlines Flight 93, and a sonic boom was reported in the area over Pennsylvania. Was there a second plane? If so, where did it come from?

That so called white jet was either a private general aviation jet that had been asked by Cleveland Center to see if it could locate United 93 or a military jet circling to report on the damage. Either way there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Flight 93 was shot down by our military.

Popular Mechanics reports:

“There was such a jet in the vicinity—a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet owned by the VF Corp. of Greensboro, N.C., an apparel company that markets Wrangler jeans and other brands. The VF plane was flying into Johnstown-Cambria airport, 20 miles north of Shanksville. According to David Newell, VF's director of aviation and travel, the FAA's Cleveland Center contacted copilot Yates Gladwell when the Falcon was at an altitude "in the neighborhood of 3000 to 4000 ft."—not 34,000 ft. "They were in a descent already going into Johnstown," Newell adds. "The FAA asked them to investigate and they did. They got down within 1500 ft. of the ground when they circled. They saw a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it. They pinpointed the location and then continued on." Reached by PM, Gladwell confirmed this account but, concerned about ongoing harassment by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.”

Some witnesses reported hat a similar white jet was seen over the WTC and that was an indication that the planes were being controlled remotely and they had no windows. Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Flight 77 blows this claim competently out of the water.

Claim No. 6: Some witnesses also reported seeing Flight 93 on fire before it crashed into the field. Why were these witnesses hushed up and why weren’t they allowed to testify for the 9/11 Commission? What was the plane they saw and did it shoot down Flight 93 upon orders from Vice President Dick Cheney?

If the plane flew into the ground intact, how did a large portion of the engine fall more than a mile away from the crash site? How did lighter debris wind up as far as eight miles away?

I addressed this in my previous post with my discussion of CFIT. Even if United 93 was shot down, and it was not, what difference would it make? It was a flying bomb headed for either the White House or the Capitol Building.

Claim No. 7: In the days following the attacks, at least 60 Israeli citizens were arrested and held secretly — some of them with ties to Israeli military and intelligence. Fox News’ Carl Cameron was the first mainstream reporter to break the news. It was weeks later before other mainstream news outlets picked up on it. His four-part series that provided evidence that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks has been scrubbed from Fox News’ website. Who were these Israelis, what did they know and what became of them? Why did Fox News scrub the stories?

I can find no legitimate evidence of this claim in any but the anti-Semitic and extreme Libertarian web sites. I did find one site, however, that referred to the Fox Report regarding the activities of AMDOCS, an Israeli telecommunications company. In the past here have been cases of espionage by Israel against the United states with the most famous case being that of Jonathan Pollard who still languishes in a U.S. Prison.

As I stated in my previous post several national intelligence services had bits and pieces of information regarding AL Qaeda and their terrorist activities. Click here for my post on What Went Wrong in Khost, a complete failure of the CIA due to its bureaucratic and academic nature.

Claim No. 7: The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is tasked with protecting American airspace. Yet even though the Federal Aviation Administration notified NORAD of the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:38 a.m. and other flights in the minutes that followed, it wasn’t until long after the last plane hit the ground that NORAD planes showed up. Where were they and why did NORAD sit on news of the hijacked planes for several minutes (which NORAD admits to but won’t explain) before scrambling any fighters?

When the 9/11 Commission tried to get answers to these questions, NORAD stonewalled and its representatives lied. What were they covering up and why? Why do they continue to stonewall to this day?

Once again the “fog of war” was in play here Of course NORAD will not explain their actions. We are still waiting for a compete explanation of the events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor. These NORAD and NEADS installation are manned by Air Force personnel not authorized on their own to launch military aircraft over the United States on intercept missions. There was also a fog of war within the halls of the FAA. Here is the timeline for the events leading to the closing of U.S. air space

9:02:59: Flight 175 crashes at about 590 mph into the south face of the South Tower (2 WTC) of the World Trade Center, banked between floors 77 and 85.[9] By this time, several media organizations, including the three major broadcast networks (who have interrupted their morning shows), are covering the first plane crash—millions see the impact live. Parts of the plane leave the building from its east and north sides, falling to the ground six blocks away.

9:03: FAA's New York Center notifies NORAD (NEADS) of the hijacking of Flight 175.

9:06: The FAA bans takeoffs of all flights bound to or through the airspace of New York Center from airports in that Center and the three adjacent Centers — Boston, Cleveland, and Washington. This is referred to as a First Tier ground stop and covers the Northeast from North Carolina north and as far west as eastern Michigan.

9:08: The FAA bans all takeoffs nationwide for flights going to or through New York Center airspace. ABC reports later that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that runs the New York-area airports, asked the FAA for permission to close down the New York Center airspace.

9:13: The F-15 fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base leave military airspace near Long Island, bound for Manhattan.

9:17: The FAA closes down all New York City-area airports. The city had initially asked the FAA to close down the airports.

9:25: The Otis-based F-15s establish an air patrol over Manhattan.

9:26: The FAA bans takeoffs of all civilian aircraft regardless of destination—a national groundstop. All military bases in the United States are ordered to increase threat conditions to Delta status.

It took ten minutes for the Air Force to launch their F-15s to form an air cap over New York and another thirteen minutes to groundstop all aircraft in U.S. air space. These were momentous moves made by men and women risking their careers on the decisions they were making. The FAA and NORAD had never encountered real-world events like this and the bureaucracy got in the way.

Popular Mechanics in their detailed debunking of the 9-11 conspiracy theories states:

“In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 1 hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet. Rules in effect back then, and on 9/11, prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts. Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). "Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ," FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM. After 9/11, NORAD and the FAA increased cooperation, setting up hotlines between ATCs and NORAD command centers, according to officials from both agencies. NORAD has also increased its fighter coverage and has installed radar to monitor airspace over the continent.”

It should be noted here that the PM report was used extensively in the National Geographic special on this same issue.

Claim No. 8: Firefighters and reporters arriving on the scene of the WTC fires claim to have heard numerous explosions before the buildings collapsed. What caused the explosions? Were they deliberately set to bring down the twin towers?

How did fires cause two skyscrapers to fall? It’s the first time fire ever brought down a skyscraper, and it happened to three buildings in one day. Why did they pancake down as if in a controlled demolition? If fire weakened the support beams, as the official stories suggest, why didn’t the towers fall to one side or the other rather than pancake down as if in a controlled event? Many engineers and architects at AE911truth.org say it could not have happened as we’re told. Why are they being ignored? Better yet, if these architects and engineers are lying about their theories, ask yourself what they stand to gain from lying and what is their motive?

Traces of an explosive called thermite were found in the rubble of the WTC and melted steel was found beneath the columns. What is the source of the thermite and what caused the steel to liquefy? Burning jet fuel does not reach a temperature high enough to liquefy steel.

I attempted to address this in my previous post but here is another take on this claim as published in Scientific American:

“In fact, if you type "World Trade Center" and "conspiracy" into Google, you'll get more than 250,000 hits. From these sites, you will discover that some people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and 175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania; and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved). Books also abound, including Inside Job, by Jim Marrs; The New Pearl Harbor​, by David Ray Griffin​; and 9/11: The Great Illusion, by George Humphrey. The single best debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of the most prevalent claims.

The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics). All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy. Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.”

As to the collapse of the two towers Michael Shermer continues in his article:

“For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology​, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists [Sic] argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.

All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon "missile strike," for example, I queried the would-be filmmaker about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time. "The plane was destroyed, and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives," he solemnly revealed. "Do you mean to tell me that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off," I retorted, "is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?" My rejoinder was met with the same grim response I get from UFOlogists when I ask them for concrete evidence: Men in Black silence witnesses, and dead men tell no tales.”

Nothing else needs to be said.

Claim No. 9: Why was the hole in the Pentagon wall too small to accommodate an airliner — both in width and height? Why were no identifiable parts of a Boeing 757 found at the crash site? Why was an engine turbofan from an A3 Skywarrior found at the crash scene? If Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon, what happened to it and its passengers and crew?

This is a tough one. As there were no news reporters at the Pentagon the only video we have is from the security camera showing the fireball erupt at the Pentagon. We do, however, have the reports of the cell phone calls Barbara Olsen made to her husband Solicitor General Ted Olsen. During he flight she called her husband twice giving him information on the status and direction of American Flight 77. Flight 77 was hijacked at 8:54. At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Olson called her husband. According to him, she reported that the flight had been hijacked, and the hijackers had knives and box-cutters. She further indicated that the hijackers were not aware of her phone call, and that they had put all the passengers in the rear of the plane. About a minute into the conversation, the call was cut off.

Shortly after, Barbara reached her husband again. She reported that the "pilot" had announced that the flight had been hijacked, and asked her husband what she should tell the captain to do. Ted Olson asked for her location and she replied that the aircraft was then flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were traveling northeast. Ted Olson informed Barbara of the two previous hijackings and crashes. She did not display signs of panic at the time. The second call was soon cut off.

Popular Mechanics reported:

“When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.

Why wasn't the hole as wide as a 757's 124-ft.-10-in. wingspan? A crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University. In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns, explains Sozen, who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings. What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. "If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen tells PM, "it didn't happen."

The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide—not 16 ft. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage.”

I guess the Truthers just ignored this evidence.

I had a colleague at this time who was retired Navy captain and an aviator who flew A-4 Sky Raiders. At the time he was living in Springfield, Virginia and he told me he had lost 7 of his neighbors in the Pentagon attack. In speaking with a few of his friends who were at the Pentagon he said there was no doubt that the building was hit by a plane. I will take his word over the ranting of some wingnut on the web.

Claim No. 10:

In the weeks and months after the attack, men alleged to have been the hijackers and supposed to have died in the attacks began turning up alive. At least seven of them have been seen since 9/11 and one was found to have died prior to 9/11 in an airplane crash. What is the explanation for this?

There is no evidence whatsoever to back this claim and nothing I say will sway the true believers.

Claim No. 11:

Why do members of the 9/11 Commission believe there are still many unanswered questions regarding the events of that day? Why did Commission members say they believed the Commission was set up to fail? Why have there been no charges of obstruction filed against those who stonewalled and lied to the Commission?

Did someone or some ones in government or within some shadowy quasi-governmental agency participate in or facilitate the attacks? Was it a coup against the Bush regime? Could that explain Bush’s seeming confusion and his trips crisscrossing the Southern portion of the U.S. before going back to Washington, D.C.? What other lies are we being told?

These are rhetorical questions with no real answers. As I stated before there have been conspiracy theories since the assignation of Abraham Lincoln. People love conspiracy theories as they explain the unexplainable. They offer simple answers to complex issue by finding a scape goat to blame. They cannot accept the fact that government is a giant bureaucracy populated with people more concerned with their careers and protecting their derrieres rather than admitting to their incompetence and negligence. They are never held accountable for their actions and just play a game of musical chairs by moving from one agency to another. Just look at the blossoming scandal of the gun running program called Fast and Furious. There will be no indictments or charges. There will be no admissions of failure or guilt. Government will simply go on to the next issue while those responsible for their failures and negligence simply move through the system or retreat to academia.

It’s Time to Privatize the FAA

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.” — Milton Friedman

Lately there has been much in the news about the misconduct of air traffic controllers. There have been reports of controllers sleeping on the job and watching movies in the control tower. This is only the surface of a corrupt, union controlled, bureaucratic air traffic control system operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Federal involvement in air traffic control has a long history. The 1926 Air Commerce Act tasked the Department of Commerce with issuing and enforcing air traffic rules, licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, establishing airways, and operating aids for air navigation. In the mid-1930s, the federal Bureau of Air Commerce took over the initial air traffic control centers for en route tracking created by the airlines, which complemented the operation of local control towers by municipal authorities. During the 1940s, the federal government began taking over the operation of local control towers, and following World War II all aspects of air traffic control became federal.

Airport development took a different path. In the early years of commercial aviation, some private airports (e.g., Burbank, California) existed alongside those established by state and local governments. Today, virtually all U.S. commercial airports are owned by state and local governments. The federal government's role has been to regulate and subsidize those facilities. Federal financial aid to airports began with work relief programs in the 1930s, and was followed by the Federal Airport Act of 1946, which provided $500 million in airport grants to state and local governments over seven years. These airports are not to be confused with the hundreds of General Aviation airports and airfields across the United States. These air fields are privately owned and operated and service the owners of non-commercial aircraft.

General aviation airports normally have one runway, hanger facilities and a tower manned on an irregular basis by private air traffic controllers. They are subject to all safety regulations of the FAA and ICAO and usually have stated hours of operation.

The coming of jet aircraft and the large number of aviation accidents spurred Congress to pass the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which created the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The new administration replaced previous federal agencies involved in air traffic control and airport development.

Congress started taxing the commercial aviation industry soon after it was established. It passed an excise tax on gasoline and aviation fuels in 1932 and an excise on airline passenger tickets in 1941. The revenue from these levies went into the federal government's general fund. That changed in 1970 when Congress passed legislation creating an Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which had dedicated streams of revenue to be used for air traffic control and federal aid to airports. Trust Fund revenue sources included ticket taxes on domestic and international flights, taxes on fuels, and various fees.

The Airport and Airway Trust Fund currently raises more than $12 billion annually from a 7.5 percent tax on domestic airline tickets, a tax on each segment flown, taxes on gasoline and jet fuel, international departure and arrival taxes, and half a dozen other fees. Trust Fund revenues pay for almost four-fifths of the FAA's $16.4 billion budget, with the balance coming from general federal funds covering the FAA's safety regulatory and miscellaneous other activities.

While air traffic control is an increasingly technology-intensive industry, labor union issues have long played an important role in the ATC system. A period of labor unrest began in the late 1960s as FAA controllers pushed for job improvements and official status as an employee union. In 1969, about 500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization stayed home "sick" causing air service interruptions. The following year, 3,000 PATCO members took part in another "sickout" or illegal strike, which caused chaos for the nation's air traffic.3

Labor problems continued during the 1970s, with various work slowdowns and union protests over contract issues. Then in 1981, PATCO declared a major system-wide illegal strike after negotiations on a new contract broke down. That prompted President Ronald Reagan to order controllers to return to work within 48 hours or else face termination. More than 11,000 controllers refused to return to work and were fired by Reagan and initially banned from federal service. PATCO was dissolved and a new controllers union was created in 1987, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA).

Today, an important aspect of the federal ATC system is the high labor costs. In 2010, the operations portion of FAA had about 43,000 workers who earned a total of $6.5 billion in wages and benefits, or about $151,000 per worker.4 Just looking at controllers, a 2005 FAA study found that compensation packages averaged $166,000 annually.5 Labor costs account for two-thirds of the cost of FAA operations.

While organized labor has created management challenges for the FAA, so has the implementation of new technologies. Delays and cost overruns on major technology projects have been common. For example, the Advanced Automation System project was launched in the early 1980s and was originally expected to cost $2.5 billion and be completed by 1996. But by 1994, estimated project costs had soared to $7.6 billion and the project was seven years behind schedule.7 The FAA terminated some parts of the AAS program and restructured others, but $1.5 billion of spending ended up being completely wasted.

More recently, a 2005 study by the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General looked at 16 major air traffic control upgrade projects and found that the combined costs had risen from $8.9 billion to $14.5 billion.8 The cost of the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System project had jumped 194 percent to $2.7 billion and was seven years behind schedule. The OIG said that the STARS project was "facing obsolescence" even before it was completed.9 Meanwhile, the cost of the Wide Area Augmentation System project had jumped 274 percent to $3.3 billion and was 12 years behind schedule. A Government Accountability Office analysis in 2005 found similar cost overruns and delays in these projects.

Delays and cost overruns have not been uncommon in federally subsidized airport projects either. For example, Denver's new international airport finally opened in 1995 after many delays and huge cost overruns. The project was originally supposed to cost $1.7 billion but ended up costing almost three times as much at $4.9 billion, with $685 million coming from federal taxpayers.

In sum, federal funding of airports and the operation of the nation's ATC system have not been models of efficiency over the decades. There is large room for improvement in the management of the nation's aviation infrastructure.

The way to address all three of these organizational problems is to take the ATC system out of the federal budget process and make it a self-supporting entity, funded directly by its customers. Variants of this commercialization approach have been recommended by a series of federal studies and commissions over the past 15 years.

As part of Vice President Al Gore's efforts at "reinventing government" in the 1990s, for example, the Clinton administration proposed turning the ATC system into a separate, self-funded, nonprofit government corporation within the Department of Transportation. The 1997 National Civil Aviation Review Commission, which was chaired by Norman Mineta, similarly proposed moving toward a self-supporting air traffic control organization.

Commercialization would entail shifting from aviation-related taxes paid to the U.S. Treasury to fees for ATC services paid directly by customers to a new self-supporting Air Traffic Organization. This change would allow fees to grow in proportion to the growth of flight activity, rather than being tied to a less-stable variable, such as fuel prices or airline ticket prices. Moreover, a predictable revenue stream that was not subject to the federal budget process would provide the basis for the ATO to issue long-term bonds for funding capital investments.

Commercialization would also address the management problems that have plagued the FAA's efforts to modernize. A non-civil-service ATO could attract the best private-sector managers and engineers skilled at implementing complex technology projects. Such an ATO could hire, fire, and compensate its employees as other high-tech businesses do. Private sector managers would have an incentive to ask tough questions about whether new investments offered real value for the money, a process that often doesn't occur at the FAA or in Congress.

In addition, a separate, self-supporting ATO—no longer part of the FAA—would be overseen at arm's length for aviation safety by the remaining FAA. Numerous studies have pointed out that the FAA's air-safety role is compromised when it comes to the ATC system, since that system is operated "in-house" by a different branch of the same FAA. All other players in aviation—pilots, mechanics, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and so forth—are regulated at arm's length for safety by the FAA. This separation of ATC operations from safety regulation is especially critical given the major changes entailed by shifting to the semi-automated next generation (NextGen) and Free Flight, where numerous safety versus capacity questions will need to be addressed in a rigorous and transparent manner.

Finally, a self-supporting ATO would address the political obstacles to improving system efficiency, such as making decisions to close facilities. By passing the enabling legislation for ATC reform, Congress would delegate such contentious issues to the customer-oriented ATO organization.

During the past two decades, nearly 50 governments have commercialized their air traffic control systems. That means they have separated their ATC activities from their transport ministries, removed them from the civil service, and made them self-supporting from fees charged to aircraft operators. These new Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) are usually regulated at arm's length by their government's aviation safety agency.

Britain's ATC system has been commercialized by means of a "public-private partnership." National Air Traffic Services is a jointly owned company, with British airlines owning 42 percent, the airport company BAA owning 4 percent, employees owning 5 percent, and the government owning the remaining minority stake. NATS is operated on a not-for-profit basis.

Canada's ATC system has been fully commercialized. In 1996, Canada set up a private, nonprofit ATC corporation, Nav Canada, which is self-supporting from charges on aviation users. The Canadian system has been widely praised for its sound finances, solid management, and its investment in new technologies. The Canadian system is a very good reform model for the United States to consider.

Nav Canada's corporate board is composed largely of aviation stakeholders. It has 4 seats for the airlines, 3 for the government, 2 for employees, and 1 for the non-commercial aviation industry. Those 10 stakeholders select 4 directors from outside aviation, and then those 14 select the company president, who becomes the 15th board member. To further strengthen governance, neither elected officials nor anyone connected with suppliers to Nav Canada can serve on the board. Nav Canada also has a 20-member outside Advisory Committee.

A number of studies have found that ATC commercialization has generally resulted in improvements to service quality, better management, and reduced costs. At the same time, air safety has remained the same or improved in the countries that have pursued reforms to set up independent ANSP organizations.

A thorough 2009 report by Glen McDougall and Alasdair Roberts (Commercializing Air Traffic Control: Have the Reforms Worked?") compared the performance of 10 commercialized ATC systems and the FAA during the 1997 to 2004 period. They looked at large amounts of performance and safety data from the systems in the various countries and conducted over 200 interviews with managers, workers, and users of the different systems. The researchers found:

“ANSP commercialization has generally achieved its objectives. Service quality has improved in most cases. Several ANSPs have successfully modernized workplace technologies. The safety records of ANSPs are not adversely affected by commercialization and in some cases safety is improved. Costs are generally reduced, sometimes significantly. Other risks of commercialization—such as erosion of accountability to government, deterioration of labor relations, or worsened relationships between civil and military air traffic controllers—have not materialized.”

Other nations and regions that have privatized their ATC systems are: EUROCONTROL, COCESNA and Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS). EUROCONTROL and COCESNA are regional organizations for Europe and Central America respectively while DFS is the German state owned ATC company. None of these organizations use union or civil service air traffic controllers. COCESNA is responsible for all ATC above 17,000 feet over Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize. All airports in the countries have their own ATC controllers to deal with approach and take off actions.

I have worked as a contractor for the FAA providing Safety of Navigation airfield surveys and for airports in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize and Venezuela providing airport surveys to develop Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) approach and departure procedures. I have also given several seminars on this subject in Port-a Prince, Trinidad-Tobago, San Salvador, Quito, Ecuador, Caracas, Venezuela Miami, Jeju Island, South Korea and at the FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Click here for a PDF file of the presentation slides.

I recall sitting in the conference room at the FAA with the Jane Garvey, the then administrator, and the assistant administrator for international projects, my client, having a discussion about the implantation the GNSS for approach and departure procedures. I was a bit shocked when I heard Garvey’s response that no such implementation could be made at commercial airports without the approval of the ATC controller’s union. He said any automation technology that would have an influence of the jobs of the controllers has to be signed off by the union. In essence the NATCA runs the FAA when it comes to cost saving or safety issues — they want to protect the jobs of the controllers.

On October 26, 2009 US Department of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel and US Government Accountability Office Director of Civil Aviation Issues Gerald Dillingham told Congress that the FAA faces considerable challenges in implementing a satellite-based NextGen ATC system, ranging from delays in approving new procedures and technology to skepticism among airlines regarding investment in new equipment. Testifying before the House of Representatives aviation subcommittee, Scovel warned that "the cost, schedule and benefits for NextGen are uncertain". Dillingham added that the "FAA faces cultural and organizational challenges in implementing NextGen capabilities".

Keep in mind that this year the FAA got $700 million dollars for ATC controller’s salaries. This, like the TSA, is an area where the civil service unions are not only dictating the terms of employment and compensation, but also impacting the efficiency and safety of our air traffic control system. 50 other nations are not taking this path.

For the United States, a commercialized ATC organization would be more likely than the FAA to efficiently implement the major aviation infrastructure advances that the nation desperately needs. Air traffic control is more complex and dynamic than ever, and it needs to be managed in the sort of efficient and flexible manner that only a commercialized environment can offer. Countries like Canada have shown the way forward for air traffic control, and U.S. policymakers should adopt the proven organizational reforms that have been implemented abroad.