Over the last few years, we have seen more and more issues with domestic air travel, including a rash of problems at the Newark airport.
The Trump administration is now pointing fingers, claiming the Biden administration is to blame for it all.
Big problems at Newark
This country is clearly struggling with air traffic controllers, as we have had far too many accidents and close calls directly related to the people calling the shots in the tower.
At Newark airport, there was recently a 90-second outage that led to about 20% of the air traffic controllers walking off the job, as they were literally blind during that period with aircraft approaching the airport.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association stated, “Air traffic controllers in Area C of the Philadelphia TRACON (PHL), who are responsible for separating and sequencing aircraft in and out of Newark Airport (EWR), temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear, or talk to them.”
According to later reports, the outrage was caused by a single wire that had burned out, with many people now questioning our infrastructure and wondering just how secure our skies really are.
Trauma leave
As if the situation was not bad enough already, a large group of air traffic controllers took “trauma leave” of up to 45 days over the incident, leaving the airport even more short-staffed than it had been.
This led to some airlines outright canceling routes that went through Newark rather than risk unsafe conditions.
For the record, none of these issues are new, as there was a 2023 report during the Biden administration recognizing that of the 138 air traffic control systems, “51 (37%) were deemed unsustainable by FAA and 54 (39%) were potentially unsustainable,” yet the administration chose to ignore the staffing and equipment issues.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained, “This is not a new problem. We’ve known this problem has existed. There have been multiple GAO reports over the last four years saying you have real problems with Air Traffic Control and you should do something with it before it actually fails.”
Wrong issues
With the Newark issues and more accidents, the Trump administration is making sure that people know who was responsible for this, especially after Biden passed that massive infrastructure deal, which Duffy claims only about 20% of the money allocated was used.
Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) says Biden was more interested in DEI than in fixing these issues, claiming, “That was before I came to Congress, but, you know, you had just mistaken priorities in that, all this DEI policy, DEI staffing, that all got baked into the cake. They could have taken that money and spent it on real modernization of what is critical infrastructure in this country.”
“We had the longest period of incident-free aviation in this country’s history, where we didn’t have a commercial air crash from the time the crash happened in Buffalo, in my district, back in 2009, to just this year, and what happened at [Ronald Reagan Airport]. And it was avoidable.”
Since then, the Trump administration has announced a new plan to be implemented over several years that will significantly upgrade air traffic controller equipment and modernize our aircraft to address these issues. I just hope they get it all addressed before planes start colliding in the sky.
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Author: Jerry McConway
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