Flying The Not-So Friendly, Slightly Deadly Skies
Don't worry. Sean Duffy's on it!
Last week, Newark Liberty International Airport experienced an air traffic system meltdown that a controller on duty described as “the most dangerous situation you could have.” Communications suddenly crashed as air traffic controllers in Philadelphia were guiding planes to Newark. According to CNN, controllers lost the ability to see planes on radar scopes for 90 seconds and for at least a minute they could not communicate with pilots. That’s all very bad.
One air traffic controller who handles Newark Airport airspace told NBC News’ Tom Costello, “It is not a safe situation right now for the flying public” and “Don’t fly into Newark. Avoid Newark at all costs.” The latter was always my position about Newark when I lived in New York City, but that was because it usually took longer for your luggage to get from the plane to baggage claim than your actual flight. I never actually feared for my life. But those carefree days are apparently over.
Air travel greatly depends on passengers feeling confident that they won’t die. They’ll be bored, horribly inconvenienced, or even have to contend with a flood of crap from the lavatory, but their plane probably won’t crash into a mountain or another plane. However, the people responsible for ensuring this level of safety go mostly unseen. Take off and landing are the most potentially dangerous parts of the flight, and thanks to air traffic control, we usually just spend that time checking our phones, even tough that’s not allowed (not me, of course).
There’s currently the worst shortage of air traffic controllers in 30 years, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which represents 10,800 certified air traffic controllers across the country. Air traffic controllers make about $127,805 a year, probably a little more if they also have a successful Instagram account.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused pauses in the training process for about two years. That increased certification times as older controllers retired. Unfortunately, the FAA had made limited efforts to ensure adequate staffing.
For several years now, air traffic controllers have warned about the negative impact of low staffing levels, usually through anonymous reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System.
“We have been short staffed for too many years and it’s creating so many unsafe situations,” one controller in Southern California wrote last year. “The FAA has created an unsafe environment to work and for the flying public. The controllers’ mental health is deteriorating.”
It didn’t help that controllers were stuck with aging, outdated equipment. Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, revealed in a March interview, “We have computers, and I kid you not, today in 2025, that are based on Windows 95 and floppy disks.”
The average age of an air traffic control tower is 40 and the radar systems are almost 40. You really don’t want your critical air traffic infrastructure dealing with a mid-life crisis.
This has been a problem for a while, so of course, the Trump administration has blamed former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. However, Buttigieg had worked to address the issue.
“We need more [air traffic controllers], and we’re hiring more,” Buttigieg said last April. “If you look at just a chart over the last 30 years or so, the number of air traffic controllers has gone down and down and down, until recently where we finally got that number going up. We hired 1,500, then 1,800 in this year. We’re requesting a budget from Congress and let us hire 2,000 next year so that you don’t have as much of this concern about controllers being overworked.”
During an interview this week with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, Buttigieg rejected the MAGA blame game and explained the efforts he’d taken to improve a bad situation, including the infrastructure failings that led to the Newark communications crash.
“I didn’t sit around saying, who can we blame for this?” Buttigieg said. “We launched a contract to modernize the infrastructure, take what's basically a copper wire system and transform it for the internet era, get fiber going there. Now, that's not something that could be done overnight. One of the things that’s hardest to do when you leave an office like that is you hand over the keys, and it's up to the new guy to take it to the next level. But that's very much something that that we had underway.”
The “new guy” is former Road Rules star Sean Duffy, who has spent the past week finding others to blame for the current problem he’s unequipped to fix. He’s claimed that Buttigieg dropped the ball on his watch because he was too obsessed with “racist roads and changing the names of cockpit to flight deck.”
What Buttigieg actually did was invest $1 billion in a pilot program aimed at helping reconnect cities and neighborhoods that were racially segregated or deliberately obliterated by road projects, but Republicans will always attack any effort toward redressing racial injustice that was actual government policy.
An airline pilots union recommended the language changes, not Buttigieg specifically. It was probably not a priority for him nor the reason behind an air traffic controller shortage. “If I can’t say cockpit or manmade, why would I even do this job?”
Last week, air traffic controllers diverted two commercial flights that were attempting to land at Reagan National Airport, because a military helicopter was in the way. Duffy accused high-ranking military officers of using the helicopters as their personal shuttle service, and said speak with the Department of Defense to “ask why the hell our rules were disregarded.”
“No more helicopter rides for VIPs or unnecessary training in a congested DCA airspace full of civilians,” Duffy posted on social media. “Take a taxi or Uber — besides most VIPs have black car service.”
Monday, on Laura Ingraham’s show, Duffy demanded questions from the Department of Defense, currently run by a drunk.
“The question becomes, who are the VIPs? Who are they?” Duffy said. “The top brass at the White House — they take a Suburban, or a Tesla, or they take their own car. Who do these generals think they are, that they have to take helicopters to go to meetings?” (Notice Duffy’s subtle plug for the company Elon Musk is tanking.)
Duffy admitted he didn’t know who was on the helicopter that violating protocol, and Ingraham wondered why he didn’t just ask the Pentagon himself, like a big boy Cabinet member: “I mean, you’re the transportation secretary, how do you not know?” Then she prodded him with her cell phone, like this was a late night talk show sketch: “Let’s call him right now!”
The other day, during an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCullum, Duffy confessed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was still ghosting him.
“I don't why the Pentagon hasn't gotten back to you on this yet. But we hope they sure do soon.”
“So do I,” Duffy responded glumly.
Later on Tuesday, Duffy tried extending Hegseth an olive branch dipped in whisky. Moderating his tone significantly, he told Politico that the two departments are working on a solution “that addresses the military’s needs while also maintaining safety for the traveling public.”
Meanwhile, the air traffic control situation has not improved. It’s unclear if Buttigieg would’ve remained in the role if Kamala Harris had won the presidency, but it’s a good bet she would’ve nominated someone actually competent for the job.
I will wager folding money that drunk Pete was on the helicopter
Ahhh this is more of the dividends of Murc's Law, because as all political and performance agency accrue to Democrats, it's perfectly fine for these useless toadstools to pass the buck. And this also just makes me angry.
Not only does Pete Buttigieg care about people in general, but he knows (as Lloyd Austin knows) that as a minority the scrutiny is EXTRA HIGH. Buttigieg's performance becomes a referendum on all gay people in public life, just as Austin becomes a referendum on Black people. If any of them have a big fuckup then it's a casus belli for retrogrades to say "Oh look, see? We shouldn't have had [minority] in this important position." This is why that unreconstructed party jumped to have Pete Buttigieg blamed for the East Palestine train wreck, so they could claim that it was not only him that was responsible for the bad situation, but all gay people would be. A Transportation Secretary wouldn't ordinarily be involved in that scale of event!
But wow, look at the stumblefucking going on here and now. For all the good Secretary Real World and Hic!Seth are doing, they might as well be replaced with a cinder block and an E-Z-Bake Oven respectively. They're in the same maladministration and they can't even talk to one another. They are both beyond the proverbial "screen door on a submarine," they are destroyed thermal protection tiles on a Space Shuttle.
Start to have the Swiss Cheese model in your minds because as this maladministration runs its course we're all going to be more acquainted with it. Our safety is conceptualized as different layers of Swiss cheese. Every moment these horrible people remain in office (to destroy the agencies and especially the regulation) the holes in the Swiss Cheese enlarge to where they form a straight line through. And more disasters will happen.
As the maladministration moves fast and breaks things, they're going to make the holes impossibly wide and we're going to be back to the Bad Old Days of aviation...and other infrastructure that these clowns are apparently in charge of.