Video: If you’re stuck in airports this holiday season …

Earlier today, I came to bury Al Gore, not to praise him. Now Nick Gillespie of Reason TV provides a little balance. Gore wanted to privatize the air-traffic control system during the Clinton years, which would have had the US following Canada’s lead — yes, Canada — in relying on the private sector to maintain air-traffic control.  Such a system would have encouraged technological innovation as well as expansion of resources to meet demand.  Instead, Congress refused to relinquish control, backed by the air-traffic controllers union that feared privatization:

“The air traffic control system in the United States is technologically obsolete,” says Robert W. Poole, Jr., director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.tv. “This model is basically the same model that we have used since the beginning of air travel.”

The technology the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to navigate $200 million jets is less advanced than the GPS technology drivers use to navigate $20,000 cars.

Poole says the system could safely handle more planes if the FAA used modern technology that would provide real-time information about where planes are. But the funding process, overseen by pork-hungry members of Congress, often thwarts technology upgrades.

Pork? Did we mention pork? John Murtha and his Airport To & From Nowhere makes a cameo appearance in this show as a reminder of Congressional spending priorities and what drives them.  Meanwhile, Canada has already begun moving towards 21st-century technology for ATC while the US polishes its 1950s infrastructure in the towers.

Interestingly, I had a connection to the 1980s attempt to modernize the towers while working at Hughes Aircraft.  Hughes had a modern, working system that it submitted to the FAA, while its chief competitor, IBM, submitted a mock-up system that had never been built.  The story is too long and complicated to retell here (it might have made a good book at the time on government procurement abuse), but in the end, the FAA chose IBM’s vaporware.  Hughes sold its system to South Korea and Canada, while IBM eventually failed to produce its system altogether.

And Nick may not have intended it, but this is a perfect illustration as to why we don’t need government in charge of health care, too.  When Congress controls investments and spending, we get Murtha Airports instead of helpful technology.  We get stuck in decades-old approaches while barring private-sector innovation.  Stakeholders become unions and politicians rather than patients and providers.  We should be looking to leverage the private sector rather than finding new ways for Congress to aggrandize itself, literally in the case of Murtha.

At any rate, don’t blame Al Gore for flight delays.  Blame him instead for the high price of fuel.

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