Amendment 10, I love your conservative interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. But from a technical aspect, aviation needs to be under federal, not state, regulation. This is true for a host of reasons.
First would be treaties with other countries for operating in each other’s airspace and technical safety standards for the aircraft and crews. It would be unwieldy for New York and Florida to have different standards.
Second would be air traffic control. The coordination between enroute air traffic control, especially for geographically smaller states, would be nightmarish. At this time there are eleven enroute air traffic control centers for the United States, not fifty.
Next would be standardization of aircraft manufacture and pilot licensing. I could go on and on.
Referring back to Mr. Hulka’s comments, whether you agree or disagree, if you ask an FAA employee where the get their authority, they will refer to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
Thank you for your post. I agree with you for the reasons that you indicated.
However …
Note that from the time that aviation was born, there has never been anything stopping the states from amending the Constitution to give the feds the power to regulate aviation.
The problem is that low-information citizens, including the likewise low-information politicians that citizens elect to federal and state offices, have not been vigilant with respect to making sure that the federal government expands its powers with the constitutionally required consent of the Constitution’s Article V state supermajority.
Many times Sometimes I think that citizens can sleep in the bed of unconstitutionally big federal government that they have made for themselves.