Proposed airline ticket tax bump has tempers soaring

— -- President Obama is asking passengers to pay a few dollars more in taxes for an airline ticket — which already is about 20% taxes and fees. And the travel industry is in an uproar about it.

Big airlines say people would buy fewer tickets if Congress approves the president's proposal to help cut the deficit and pay for the nation's aviation system.

Regional airlines, which carry more than half of domestic fliers each day, say it could force them to pull out of small cities.

Small-city airports worry about that.

And some travelers and consumer groups say it's just unfair to ask passengers to pay more on top of the taxes and fees that government and airports already charge.

"We are flying on packed planes at increasingly higher rates with larded-on fees and taxes," says Adam Conrad, 45, a health care software executive from Duncansville, Pa. "I have flown over a million miles, and my next million is looking like it will cost a million."

Obama's proposal, which he spelled out last week, would:

•Impose a $100 fee on each commercial airliner and corporate jet every time they take off. Only military planes and small planes with piston engines would be excluded from the new take-off fee.

•Raise the per-passenger security fee, which helps pay for the Transportation Security Administration's airport screening, from the current $2.50 for each leg of a flight to a maximum $5 for a one-way trip to a flat $5 one way. The fee also would rise another 50 cents a year from 2013 through 2017 to $7.50. The Homeland Security Department could raise it further through regulation.

The president's goal is to raise $36 billion to help trim $4 trillion off the deficit in the next decade and get more so-called user-fee money to underwrite aviation security, airport improvement and air traffic control.

Although the increases would be passed on to passengers through ticket prices, and some of the effects of increases would be small or not felt by passengers for awhile, the airline industry says they're a burden at a time the industry is struggling to make a profit.

"Aviation shouldn't be a piggy bank for every other purpose," says Roger Cohen president of the Regional Airline Association. "This was proposed, I think, based on the (bank robber) Willie Sutton theory that this is where the money is."

Small airlines, big hit

Perhaps no part of the industry is howling louder than regional airlines. They say the $100 tax on a plane every time it takes off hits them — and the passengers that fly on their planes — the hardest.

Although more than half of all domestic passengers travel on roughly 13,000 regional airline flights a day, they're flying on smaller planes with fewer fellow passengers than on a 200-seat jetliner flown by bigger airlines such as Southwest or Delta.

They're often the shuttle airlines between smaller cities and larger ones, or between big cities that aren't that far apart.

Indicative of their load: About 63% of the departures at Chicago O'Hare in July were on regional carriers. It was 82% from Cincinnati and nearly 88% from Des Moines.

Some of the flights, especially from smaller cities, carry only seven, nine or a dozen passengers.

Cohen estimates the tax would cost passengers $3.23 more per ticket to fly out of Springfield, Ill.; $15 from Pierre, S.D.; and $36 from Joplin, Mo.