Opinion ID: 446761
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The National Air Traffic Control System

Text: 51 If interpreting every de minimis tax incentive as sufficient federal financial assistance to trigger the coverage of federal antidiscrimination statutes would be overbroad in its consequences and reach, petitioners' argument that the government's expenditure of some two billion dollars annually to provide airlines with a national system of air traffic control seems, by contrast, appropriately narrow and specific. 109 This program employs, on a twenty-four hour basis, highly-trained air traffic management personnel who monitor and control takeoffs, landings, and en route flights of civil and military aircraft in order to assure safe and expeditious air transportation. By directly financing the operation of twenty-five control centers, more than four hundred terminal control facilities, and additional flight service stations, as well as by administering its flight standards and medical fitness programs, petitioners argue, the federal government provides financial assistance that is absolutely critical to the operation of the airlines. 110 52 It cannot be seriously disputed that the safe and efficient operation of commercial air transportation depends in great measure (if not, as petitioners assert, entirely) upon the proper functioning of the national air traffic control system. 111 One can scarcely imagine a modern airline representing to its customers that a regularly scheduled flight will leave at a time certain and arrive reliably at its destination if this essential service 112 provided by the FAA did not exist. Moreover, this crucial assistance may reasonably be considered financial. Definitions of federal financial assistance issued by both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice state explicitly that the term encompasses 53 any grant, loan, contract, ... or any other arrangement by which the agency provides or otherwise makes available assistance in the form of: (1) Funds; (2) Services of Federal personnel; or (3) Real and personal property or any interest in or use of such property .... 113 54 Consequently, petitioners' argument that the federal air traffic control system is an arrangement that provides or otherwise makes available assistance in the form of ... services of Federal personnel leads reasonably to the conclusion that the system does indeed constitute federal financial assistance to all commercial air carriers. It follows, therefore, that any and all carriers making use of the federal air traffic control system should be subject to any regulations promulgated under section 504. 55 Respondents attack this argument on several grounds. First, they contend that regulatory history and common sense make it clear that the current services of Federal personnel language really means the loan or detail of Federal personnel to carry out functions which private (i.e., airline) employees would otherwise have to perform, e.g. fly airplanes. 114 We are not persuaded, however, that the language of the Justice Department's implementing regulations should be taken to signify anything less than the plain meaning of the words themselves. As a general matter, courts eschew narrow interpretations of remedial statutes. Instead, remedial statutes are normally accorded broad construction in order to effectuate their purpose. 115 As the Senate report on the 1974 amendments to the Rehabilitation Act explained, section 504 was enacted to prevent discrimination against all handicapped individuals ... in relation to Federal assistance in employment, housing, transportation, education, health services, or any other Federally-aided programs. 116 To that end, section 504 and the civil rights statutes with which it shares a common language and heritage must be liberally construed in order that their beneficent objectives may be realized to the fullest extent possible. 117 56 Respondents' more substantial line of attack reiterates a point first articulated by the Board in justifying its Final Rule below: It is the position of the FAA, with which we concur, that its air traffic control services are not financial assistance to airlines. Rather, they are services provided to the public generally to ensure flight safety. 118 The federal air traffic control and safety programs, respondents suggest to this court, must be considered 57 in the general category of public goods. They are the goods and services from which all citizens and businesses benefit.... Thus, for example, the government may assure clean air through a variety of means, Federally financed or operated. But the recipient of the benefit cannot be precisely located, and no one enjoys an exclusive benefit. The air controllers help to assure safe skies; this assists airlines more directly than it assists other enterprises; yet it also assists all enterprises that use the airlines or fly private planes in the course of their business. It also protects those on the ground from plane crashes. It does not, however, amount to Federal financial assistance. 58 If, as PVA seems to assume, Congress had wanted to cover every enterprise benefitting from a federal program, it would have said so, but it did not. 119 59 It is true that in important respects the provision of air traffic controllers might be analogized to the provision of highway patrolmen or traffic signs or signal; federal funding of such programs would not be likely to be considered the sort of Federal financial assistance sufficient to bring every private trucking business or other enterprise that used the highways within the scope of section 504. On the other hand, respondents concede that the air controller program assists airlines more directly and extensively and specifically than other enterprises. Moreover, as petitioners observe, it would be absurd to exempt a federally-funded local transit authority or school system from compliance with section 504 on the ground that public transportation benefits passengers as well as transit systems and, like public education and safe air travel, it is a public good. 120 The fact is that the air traffic control system is indispensable to the very existence of modern commercial aviation, and that if it were not provided by the federal program now in place, it would have to be provided, and paid for, by the airlines themselves. 121 60 It is at this juncture, however, that our analysis must be informed by the Supreme Court's resolution of a related problem in a case that has been decided since we heard oral argument in this matter. In Grove City College v. Bell, --- U.S. ----, 104 S.Ct. 1211, 79 L.Ed.2d 516 (1984), the Court construed the language of Title IX's prohibition against sex discrimination in any education program or activity that is receiving Federal financial assistance in a manner that compels us to focus less on the mode of assistance than on the program or activity being assisted. In particular, although the Court warned that nothing in Title IX justified making the application of the nondiscrimination principle dependent on the manner in which a program or activity receives federal assistance, 122 it emphasized as well that an agency's authority to regulate under Title IX was limited by the program specific nature of the statute. 123 Thus, even if the economic ripple effects of federal financial aid to a college's students resulted in additional funds for the institution's general operating budget, a plurality of the Court held, per Justice White, that only the College's own financial aid program ... may properly be regulated under Title IX. 124 61 The implications of the Grove City analysis for the case before us are not completely clear. To the extent to which petitioners argue that a national air traffic control system would have to be provided at the airlines' own expense if it were not provided by the federal government (i.e., that this federal program has economic ripple effects that make additional funds available for other airline operations), the Grove City plurality would appear to be unsympathetic. And if the federal air traffic control system is the program or activity which is deemed to receive federal financial assistance, then the program-specific mandate of Grove City would imply that only that particular system--its personnel practices and physical facilities, for example--could be regulated under section 504. If, on the other hand, the program or activity at issue is deemed to be that of commercial air transportation as engaged in by the air carriers, and if the air traffic system is deemed--via its personnel and facilities--to be the federal financial assistance provided to that program, then any program specificity problem with petitioners' argument is avoided. 62 Such a problem is not before us in the instant case, however, because we need not reach it to hold that the CAB erred as a matter of law in failing to apply its section 504 regulations to all commercial air carriers. We base this holding upon the federal government's funding of airports and airways, upon the necessary and inextricable integration of these facilities with all commercial air carriers and, above all, upon the clear intent of Congress in passing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the effort of appropriate agencies to effectuate the mandate of section 504 in the unique context of commercial air transportation.