Donald Trump has said that current air traffic control issues were caused by the "incompetent Biden Administration," and called Pete Buttigieg a "total novice."
Hmm… Break shit, blame others, announce he will fix it, doesn’t fix shit.
It wasn’t fine. ATC hasn’t been properly staffed in decades, and many of them are functioning alcoholics because they can’t get mental health support or they’ll be forced to take unpaid leave for 6 months.
Like everything else, Trump made it all worse, but ATC has been struggling since before Reagan due to chronic underfunding. It’s been getting worse as more and more of them retire. Trump made it worse by firing the replacements who had undergone years of training. When things began to derail, they hired back the ones that had already retired.
There’s no game plan. Congress has no game plan in place to fix this. I’m not a both sides kind of person (check my comment history), but most elected officials in Congress are completely incompetent. It goes without saying for this administration as well.
As one example, the current problems in Newark are because there are just 20 ATCs that work that airport (from Philadelphia by wire) and 5 of them went on leave. This in turn caused downstream effects in other places because airlines cancelled flights or had to reroute. Think about that: the Northeast aviation system begins to fall apart if a single-digit number of people who normally work 6 days a week, who work overtime, decide to take leave.
The reason they went on leave is because they lost all communications for like 90 seconds when they were tracking a couple dozen flights. These people are such nervous wrecks and it came so close to a major aviation disaster that they had to go on leave to recuperate from the stress.
It’s become very clear over the last 20 years that most people in charge all just assumed everything would continue to coast, the status quo would never change, and have absolutely no idea what to do when someone grabs the steering wheel and jerks it into the oncoming lanes.
Funny, things seemed to be fine under the previous administration. Odd!
It wasn’t fine. ATC hasn’t been properly staffed in decades, and many of them are functioning alcoholics because they can’t get mental health support or they’ll be forced to take unpaid leave for 6 months.
Like everything else, Trump made it all worse, but ATC has been struggling since before Reagan due to chronic underfunding. It’s been getting worse as more and more of them retire. Trump made it worse by firing the replacements who had undergone years of training. When things began to derail, they hired back the ones that had already retired.
There’s no game plan. Congress has no game plan in place to fix this. I’m not a both sides kind of person (check my comment history), but most elected officials in Congress are completely incompetent. It goes without saying for this administration as well.
As one example, the current problems in Newark are because there are just 20 ATCs that work that airport (from Philadelphia by wire) and 5 of them went on leave. This in turn caused downstream effects in other places because airlines cancelled flights or had to reroute. Think about that: the Northeast aviation system begins to fall apart if a single-digit number of people who normally work 6 days a week, who work overtime, decide to take leave.
The reason they went on leave is because they lost all communications for like 90 seconds when they were tracking a couple dozen flights. These people are such nervous wrecks and it came so close to a major aviation disaster that they had to go on leave to recuperate from the stress.
It’s become very clear over the last 20 years that most people in charge all just assumed everything would continue to coast, the status quo would never change, and have absolutely no idea what to do when someone grabs the steering wheel and jerks it into the oncoming lanes.
In part, this is the thesis of the doc HyperNormalisation.
Everything became about the maintenance of the current order, instead of moving forward.
Just like climate change
That one I think is more “the people in charge figured they would all be dead before it became a problem”
I fully expect that if the cure for aging was discovered, billionaires would suddenly care a LOT more about climate change.