Who or What is the Air Travelers Association?
14-Mar-2007
By Karen Di Piazza
On March 7, David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, paid to have his press release placed on PRNewswire, titled, quote, unquote, “Air Travelers Association Says Airline Passengers Should No Longer Be Required to Subsidize Corporate Jets,” favoring the FAA’s plan to impose user fees onto general aviation. His press release, presented as news in both airline-based and in some mainstream publications in part stated: “All that passengers are asking is that corporate jets pay their fair and equitable share of what they use of the aviation system…”
This journalist decided to take a closer look at this organization. After checking out this association’s website, only to find a cell, fax and a home telephone number, Stempler was contacted. When he was asked what his association’s address was, he said, “I’m not going to release that information.” That’s odd. Any association we know of that claims to represent the public’s interest provides an address. Stempler was asked how many airline passengers his for-profit association represented, but he declined comment. When he was asked if he had any data to substantiate claims that airline passengers were complaining about corporate jets not paying their fair share for air traffic control services, he said he didn’t have that data. “People email me,” he said. However, when he was asked how many emails he had received on this issue, he declined comment.
Stempler said he was a retired aviation attorney. And this is the same David Stempler that was written about on
on July 31, 1997, after he decided to publish an airline safety report card. In part, the news article stated: The Air Travelers Association is a for-profit venture. To order a copy of the Airline Safety Report Card, you have to listen to a sales pitch for a $49.95 one-year membership in the travel club, and agree to sign up for a three-month trial membership for $4.95.
On July 2, 1997, another publication, the Sun-Sentinel wrote about Stempler titling the piece “Consumer Group Flunks ValuJet; Grading Methods of Safety Test Questioned,” which was posted in the national section, page 3A. In part, the author William E. Gibson, Washington, D.C. bureau chief wrote: “The Air Travelers Association--established this year to inform consumers while making a profit as a discount travel service--rated the airlines based on their number of fatal accidents per thousand flights. ValuJet, based on one fatal accident in the Florida Everglades last year, was the only domestic carrier to flunk the test.”
The article pointed out “aviation safety groups, industry analysts and the Federal Aviation Administration all scoffed at the methodology of the report card and discounted its value as a gauge of airline safety.” Stempler told CharterX that he did publish that safety report card, which is still hyped on his “associations” website. “But we’re not a fee-based membership any longer,” he said. When Stempler was asked how his organization was funded, he declined to comment.
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