Tuesday, August 23, 2005

NavCanada Bill

This morning's mail brought the bill from NavCanada for ATC services during the Great Alaska Flying Adventure (tm). Not as bad as I thought it might be. I was expecting a base charge plus services for each time I got a briefing, etc. I don't know why I thought that was the case.

In any event, the total bill was only Can $18.00. At today's exchange rate of 0.834945, this translates to US $15.03. Since I can't write a check in Canadian dollars through my bank, I'll just put it on the Visa. The exchange rate isn't as competitive, and they tack on a small surcharge, but the total damage should come in at under $20.00.

This covers the entire quarter from June 1 to August 31, so my co-owner that flew to Ontario recently gets a freebie. I'll make him buy the next dinner! (Just kidding JS....)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'd rather not pay the Nav Canada fee myself, but I'm not surprised about your confusion: there's certainly a lot of BS being floated around by opponents of ATC privatization in the U.S. about what we actually pay up here (to be fair, there's also a lot of BS being floated around by proponents of ATC privatization about how much our private system saves).

Every Canadian small-aircraft owner pays the annual flat fee of about CAD 72.00, and we get unlimited ATC/FSS services in return. For someone like me, who flies a lot of IFR, it's a reasonably good deal (assuming we have to pay at all); for someone who, say, flies her NORDO Cub out of her own grass strip, it feels like a bit of a rip-off.