Safety First?
Somewhere, somehow, Marion Blakey and her Administration seem to have lost sight of their mandate to provide for the safety of American citizens who travel by air. Perhaps it was when she made the decision to get rid of those pesky general aviation aircraft by starting the user-fee juggernaut. Perhaps it was earlier, when someone saw that one of the portions of the FAA, the Flight Service Station system, was carrying out its designated function rapidly, accurately, safely, and generally working in a nearly flawless manner. Naturally the reaction was that such a situation was intolerable. Because ongoing competence in the field of safe aviation could not be allowed to continue, the FAA went through a grueling and expensive process to fix it. In October of 2005, ostensibly to save the taxpayers money, it entered into a $1.7 billion contract to "privatize" (is that really a verb?) a portion of the FAA that worked well. I know, children ... one would think that if private industry could do a government function better than the government, then the FAA would have privatized one of the parts of the FAA that doesn't work. Children, such a thought would require us to apply that evil concept, logic, to the operation of political machinery. Children, you know very well that logic should never be used when traveling through the looking glass into privatization land.
/snip
http://www.avweb.com/news/pilotlounge/pilots_lounge_fss_mess_195387-1.html