An obscure sentence in the failed FAA reauthorization bill to reform the U.S. air traffic control (ATC) system raised the prospect of additional user fees that could have been imposed on pilots and aircraft operators, according to Tyson Weihs, co-founder and CEO of app developer ForeFlight.

In the proposed language for ATC reform in H.R.2997, the  21st Century AIRR Act, the private entity formed to run ATC would also be given all the intellectual property owned by the FAA. This includes aeronautical data that pilots rely on for navigation, software, and information technology systems, Weihs pointed out during a presentation at the Westchester Aviation Association's third-annual Safety Day on Wednesday.

Earlier this decade, the FAA had proposed that the costs of creating aeronautical data be paid for by users of that data, through app vendors such as ForeFlight. “The FAA has a mandate to produce and maintain aeronautical data,” he said. “The amount of paper they're printing and the number of charts that they are selling is going down, so that did create some strain in 2011 and 2012. And the FAA came to all of the app vendors and said, ‘We would like to make $190 million. So we want each of you to tell us how many subscribers you have and we're going to just divide $190 million by that number. And that's what you guys are going to pay.’”

The FAA relented and didn’t transfer its data costs onto vendors, in part, Weihs said, because it managed costs by eliminating unnecessary work, including shutting down its printing plant in Silver Springs, Maryland. “It remains to be seen whether or not they'll pop back up at some point in time and go, ‘We'll need to charge for that,’” he said.

But then H.R. 2997 came about, and it appears that little attention was focused on what happens to the FAA’s intellectual property as a result of ATC reform. “The government was going to transfer all of the intellectual property, software systems, the systems we use to file flight plans, to get briefings, to access the aeronautical data they produce to this private entity,” he said. “Once you transfer all of these assets over to this private entity and they've got a giant $30 billion note to pay down, what are they going to start doing with those assets?”

In Weihs’s opinion, the new ATC corporation would simply pass its costs onto users. “They're going to find ways to charge for them. Even if we wouldn't have user fees for getting into an airport, they could introduce user fees for the electrons. No plane flies without data or electrons. If that data became incredibly expensive as a result of privatization, it would affect everybody that has navigation data in their airplanes. I viewed that as a real threat and got very excited about that and spent a lot of time on calls last summer, educating senators and representatives about the electrons that we were going to get charged for as a result of transferring all that data.”