An influential Washington, D.C. think tank that routinely targets corporations, the police, and personal wealth has turned its focus to business aviation. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is promoting its recent study, “High Flyers 2023,” as an examination of “how ultra-rich private jet travel costs the remaining of us and burns up our planet.” The report charges private aviation with making a disproportionate environmental footprint and benefitting from unfair tax policy.
The report includes quite a lot of measures beneficial by the organization, including a ten percent sales tax on all preowned private aircraft sales and a 5 percent tax on recent aircraft transactions; doubling the federal fuel tax on business aircraft; imposing a surcharge on “short hop” flights of lower than 210 miles, with higher rates applying for flights lower than 100 miles; blocking increases to passenger facility charges for airline passengers and as an alternative raising additional tax revenues from private jet owners; making a Sustainable Transportation Equity Trust Fund to fund rail infrastructure and bike lanes; increasing TSA security oversight of personal jets; and enacting laws requiring the FAA to supply full transparency on the ownership of U.S.-registered private aircraft.
This study follows the enactment of a “luxury tax” on private aircraft in Canada last 12 months and growing opposition to business aviation in Europe on environmental grounds, including several protests there late last 12 months that coincided with the COP27 climate change conference in Egypt.
NBAA pushed back hard against the IPS study. In an announcement issued to AIN, NBAA called it a “misleading and partisan caricature of business aviation” and noted that business aviation is “an important American industry, supporting greater than one million jobs, generating nearly $250 billion in economic activity, connecting towns and communities across the country, and providing flights for worthy humanitarian causes.
“Among the many study’s mischaracterizations and selective use of knowledge, its most glaring factual omission is that for a long time, business aviation has been a testbed for technologies that reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, and pave the way in which for realizing the established goal of achieving net-zero emissions from business aircraft by 2050,” NBAA said. “How can it’s that the 30-plus-page study misses entirely the game-changing breakthroughs pioneered by business aviation which have been key to reaching this net-zero goal? NBAA urges an honest discussion of business aviation’s societal advantages and environmental leadership.”