GM Asks FAA To Remove Private Jets From Public Tracking Site

by: Bill Dupray   posted: 2008-11-29 11:45:00
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When you get to the bottom, keep digging fellas.

The Chairmen of the Big 3 automakers took a ration of grief for flying private jets down to Washington to beg for money to bail out their incompetently-managed, failing companies.

Adding a public relations disaster to a fiscal disaster didn't help. As a result, the companies announced they may be selling a couple of the jets.

But they are obviously pissed off that somebody was able to track the fact that they flew the jets to Washington in the first place. So they have asked the FAA to block the public's ability to track the jets.

General Motors Corp., criticized by U.S. lawmakers for its use of corporate jets, asked aviation regulators to block the public’s ability to track a plane it uses.

“We availed ourselves of the option as others do to have the aircraft removed” from a Federal Aviation Administration tracking service, a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said yesterday in an interview. He declined to discuss why GM made the request.

Flight data show that the leased Gulfstream Aerospace G-IV jet flew Nov. 18 from Detroit to Washington, where Chief Executive Officer Richard Wagoner Jr. spoke to a Senate committee that day and a House panel the next day on behalf of a $25 billion auto-industry rescue plan.

Representatives at the Nov. 19 House hearing including Democrat Gary Ackerman of New York faulted Wagoner, Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally and Chrysler LLC CEO Robert Nardelli for taking private jets to Washington to plead their case.

“Couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class?” Ackerman said. . . .

An FAA spokeswoman, Laura Brown, said she couldn’t immediately determine whether her agency had granted GM’s flight-privacy request. “We do this routinely” for aircraft owners, she said yesterday. “They don’t have to have a reason” for requesting the block, she said.

I have no problem with these guys taking their private jets to a bake-sale if they want to. The market will correct for such mismanagement.

The reason this issue is important now is because these companies are asking to be sheltered from free market forces. Congress wants to take over the management of the companies in return for the bailout money. This is anti-capitalist folly, of course, but if that is the decision, then our tax dollars are being used to prop up companies that will ultimately fail anyway and we should demand open books and full disclosure of the uses of all capital by the company and its executives. If taxpayer money is paying for these jets, then they do need a reason to hide their usage from the public.

H/T Instapundit

Tags: FAA, GM, private jets, 

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