On a Wing and a Prayer, but Mostly a Prayer

 

                  Remnant of a commercial airliner and an Army helicopter from 

                         Reagan Airport crash, Jan 29th, that killed 167 passengers

On a Wing and a Prayer, but Mostly a Prayer

“I think it is clear that the blame belongs with the last administration…[Former DOT head Pete] Buttigieg and Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken… During COVID, when people weren’t flying? That was a perfect time to fix these problems.”

 Dean Duffy, Department of Transportation head at a May 19th press conference at the DOT.

As we watch near-hits (not, “near-misses”) at airports across the land, as aircraft crashes rise and military aircraft threaten commercial traffic, and archaic systems across the land, but most visibly at Newark’s major airport (one of the main NYC hubs), crash or blank out, you have to ask yourself why this escalation in commercial flying risks in the United States is so bad, much worse than anything we have seen in recent years.

Asks LA Times journalist, Michael Hiltzik (LA Times column on May 20th), “Who’s responsible for the aviation mess? Transportation Secretary Duffy says it’s everyone but him.” Standard Trump administration response, even as two cabinet level Trump appointees whose major qualifications appear to be as former Fox News personalities – Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – just cannot do much more than remain silent or blame the Biden Administration. The above quote is classic, particularly since Trump was President during a significant part of the COVID pandemic. When asked, Hegseth never did explain why Army helicopters frequent commercial airspace without clearance from civilian traffic controllers.

But GOP opposition to authorizing needed FAA technology upgrades and adding more air traffic controllers is the main culprit, along with the dramatic inexperience of Duffy and Hegseth amplified by DOGE efforts to trim the federal workforce. Blame Biden. He managed to pass an infrastructure bill that included serious upgrades to our nation’s ports and airports, which Republicans are trying to repeal, federal savings that would give tax cuts to the rich.

But flying, for pleasure, business or even necessity is a normal part of American life, so naturally when there are a string of mishaps that, remarkably all happen after Trump took office, DOGE eliminated as many federal employees as possible… including offering buyouts to air traffic controllers who take years to train… under the “watchful” eye of some of the least competent and least knowledgeable cabinet and subcabinet appointees in our nation’s history, well, that “blame Biden” mantra doesn’t cut it anymore. And while we cannot blame the January 29th collision over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport on Trump, 9 days after he was sworn in for Trump 2.0, stuff that developed later is all Trump. As Hiltzik continues:

“The highest-profile failure (so far) is the disaster named Newark Liberty International Airport, where flight delays can last for the better part of a day and questions about safety are rife… Duffy, a former reality show contestant and four-term congressman, comes to the blame game with dirty hands. Let’s take a look…

“First, in 2019, when Duffy was a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, the bill to fund the Department of Transportation among other agencies came before the House. Duffy voted against it. So did 179 other members of the GOP caucus; 12 Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure… Second, the pandemic year in which ‘people weren’t flying’ was 2020. That year, the domestic passenger count plummeted to 369.4 million from 926.7 million the previous year. It was the lowest figure since 1984… Who was president in 2020? Not Biden, but Donald Trump.

“After 2020, passenger loads crept back up, reaching 666.2 million in 2021 and continuing higher to the record of 982.7 million last year. If there was an opportunity to upgrade the air traffic system at the least inconvenience to passengers, it was 2020. But nothing was done then, on Trump’s watch… I asked the Department of Transportation last week if Duffy could reconcile these evidently misleading and inconsistent statements. I’m still waiting for a reply.

“Duffy has maintained that it’s still safe to fly in and out of Newark, despite outages during which air traffic controllers’ screens went black and radios went silent — for 30 seconds on April 28 and 90 seconds on May 9. A backup system failed at the airport May 11 for 45 minutes, causing delays and cancellations for hundreds of flights.

“Duffy admitted to the right-wing radio host David Webb on May 12 that he had switched his wife’s flight reservation for the next day from Newark to LaGuardia airport. He subsequently explained that he didn’t say to do so because he thought Newark was unsafe, but to spare her a long delay. In other words, he had found a solution for his family, but not for the overall traveling public, which didn’t speak well for his management of the mess at Newark.

“It’s proper to note that the Federal Aviation Administration has been in an operational funk for years. Duffy can try to blame Biden, but that’s a smokescreen. During Trump’s first term, when the FAA’s problems were well known, hiring and deployment of air traffic controllers actually shrank from the level during the Obama administration according to the DOT’s inspector general, to the point where staffing ‘could not keep pace with attrition… In the first budget he submitted after taking office in 2017, Trump proposed slashing the DOT budget by 13%. The budget plan called for cutting 30,000 workers from the FAA staff.’”

Can we fix the system? Not if budget cutting and tax cuts are a priority over everything else. Not if we cut federal employees and ask questions later. And if we need to weed our fraud, corruption, waste and incompetence, let’s start at the top of the Trump administration and work our way down. Grift, hotel and resort deals, a big gift that we actually asked for, crypto investments, conflicts of interests…. Let’s face it, Trump appointees do not reflect a meritocracy… more a kleptocracy. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and as long as mythology and conspiracy theories are taken as the truth… and blame is more valuable than fixing the problem, the merger of common sense and earned expertise cannot be expected to fix what needs to be fixed.