Glenn Reynolds, the blogger behind Instapundit.com is congratulating the Bush administration for fighting global warming by sticking it to all those evil rich people flying corporate jets. He’s providing links to Senators and Congressmen and urging his large number of readers to contact them on the issue. I think there needs to be some counterweight to the “Instalanche” that will be hitting Washington today.
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Reynolds is a sharp guy, but he obviously hasn’t spent any time researching the issue, or he would know that this is actually a set up for the takeover of the public’s airways by a private company. I suspect he’s been the recipient of political insider distributions urging his post today.

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Glenn doesn’t understand that we’re sitting at the cross roads that will determine whether the airways are controlled by a few large corporations that will pack the pork into large jets, or whether the airways belong to the people who will be free to fly their personal aircraft whenever and wherever they wish. He doesn’t know that if we were to ramp up the number of private aircraft by an order of magnitude or two, that they would be very high performance for a reasonably low cost because of the economies of scale. Such aircraft would have such sophisticated equipment for navigation, traffic control, and pilotage that it would be easy to train a “regular person” to fly it safely in any weather.

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It’s as if we’re in 1910, and the automobile is getting ready to take over transportation in the country, but the railroads successfully lobby the government to regulate cars in such a tight manner that they never become more than a hobby for rich people. After all, the railroads are much better than the automobile for the environment. I don’t think Glenn would really want to go back to that kind of world.
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Glenn claims to be a futurist, but if he were really serious about advancing travel technology for the masses, and actually understood the issues here, he would have the opposite opinion.

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Update: Huh Oh. Instalanche Time. Instapundit linked here. Welcome folks and come back to visit.

I probably stuck my foot in it by assuming Glenn had some e-mail or other prompt about this issue. Maybe Drudge got it instead. For sure this issue would not have been noticed outside aviation circles unless someone was promoting the FAA/Airline side of the issue.