This is an adapted excerpt from the May 5 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Nine days after Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as president, a terrible midair collision killed 67 people just outside Reagan National Airport over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Two days later, on Jan. 31, a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia. Seven people were killed and another two dozen were injured.
Two days after that, a United Airlines plane caught fire on the tarmac in Houston, where flames were seen shooting out of the wing. There were 104 passengers and five crew members who were evacuated. Three days later, on Feb. 5, a Japan Airlines plane smashed into the tail of a Delta plane on the tarmac at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
On Feb. 7, officials recovered the wreckage of a small commercial plane that crashed in Alaska; all 10 people on board were killed. Three days after that, one person was killed when one plane smashed into another at the airport in Scottsdale, Arizona. On Feb. 15, two people were killed when a small plane crashed in Covington, Georgia. Four days after that, two people were killed when two planes collided midair at a regional airport just northwest of Tucson, Arizona.
Before the election, Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk, demanded that the FAA’s then-administrator, Michael Whitaker, resign.
At this point, we weren’t even one month into Trump’s second term. But it keeps going.
On Feb. 24, a Delta flight from Atlanta was forced to turn around and have an emergency evacuation after the cabin filled with smoke. One day later, an American Airlines flight was forced to abort its landing at Reagan National Airport to avoid colliding with another plane. On March 1, a FedEx cargo plane landed at Newark Liberty International Airport with its engine on fire.
Over the next two weeks, 15 more people were killed in nine more air crashes, including one alongside a Nashville highway in which three children were killed. On March 17, a Delta flight smacked its wing into the runway while landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York.
On March 28, back again at Reagan National Airport, a Delta passenger plane preparing to take off and a military jet preparing to land both received emergency last-second instructions to divert to prevent a collision. Six days later, a flight from Key West, Florida, to Newark had to divert to Washington Dulles after a fire in the cabin.
A week later, six members of Congress were on board an American Airlines plane that clipped the wing of another American Airlines plane at Reagan National Airport. That same day, April 10, a helicopter crashed into the Hudson River in New York City, killing six people, including three kids.
Over the next 10 days, 21 more people were killed in seven more plane crashes. On April 21, the thing you never think happens in real life happened on the tarmac at the Orlando International Airport: passengers evacuated down the slides as their Delta flight caught fire.
Last week, two passenger planes were forced to abort their landings at the last minute to avoid a collision with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, once again, at Reagan National Airport in Washington.
Typically, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration is not a job that is supposed to turn over with every new president. It’s one of the jobs that has a five-year term because it’s not a particularly political position, but rather a technocratic job that needs stability. This time around, that wasn’t the case.
Before the election, Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk, demanded that the FAA’s then-administrator, Michael Whitaker, resign. At that point, Whitaker was only about a year into his five-year term, and there had been no major U.S. plane crashes in quite some time. However, under his leadership, the FAA had issued fines of a few hundred thousand dollars against Musk’s company, SpaceX.
A few weeks later, thanks in part to Musk providing the largest political donation in the history of the United States, his candidate is elected president, and Whitaker sees the writing on the wall and resigns.
Trump did not name a replacement for Whitaker. In fact, he didn’t even name an acting administrator until after the midair collision over the Potomac.
He did, however, pick Sean Duffy — the husband of one of his favorite Fox News hosts, a guy who was once a contestant on “The Real World” on MTV, a guy with no aviation or transportation experience whatsoever — to be his transportation secretary.
Nothing against MTV, but it’s possible this guy is in slightly over his head. It seems even Duffy is a bit freaked out by the gravity of his job. Last week at a Cabinet meeting, he warned that if the “aging infrastructure” of the U.S. air traffic control system wasn’t updated, “there’s going to be failures and people will lose their lives.”
Well, we now know that something really terrifying had just happened right before that Cabinet meeting, something the Transportation Department was not talking about publicly.
Over the last few days, you may have seen some headlines about things being really snarled at Newark Airport, with hundreds of flights canceled or delayed. What’s even worse — and weirder — the biggest commercial airline at Newark, United Airlines, just cut 35 of its daily flights out of the airport. Newark isn’t the only major airport in this area, so why is it alone facing these issues? What’s going on?
We may now have our answer. On Monday, The New York Times reported that two days before last week’s Cabinet meeting, “air traffic controllers temporarily lost communication with planes at Newark Liberty International Airport.”
The Times reported:
[A] spokesman for the union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said that on April 28, controllers in a Philadelphia air traffic control center who are responsible for separating and sequencing aircraft in and out of Newark Airport ‘temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control,’ and were ‘unable to see, hear, or talk to them.’
As Bloomberg News reported, when radar or radio frequencies stop working, “there are no fail-safes,” meaning controllers have to “wait for the system to come back online.” According to Bloomberg, following the outage, multiple employees were placed on trauma leave. The incident reportedly “left several controllers visibly shaken, with some shedding tears, and at least one experiencing stress-induced heart palpitations.”
This follows reporting from NBC News’ Tom Costello, who said that one air traffic controller who handles Newark Airport airspace told him, “It is not a safe situation right now for the flying public” and “Don’t fly into Newark. Avoid Newark at all costs.”
That’s the situation we’re in: Air traffic controllers are having heart palpitations, breaking down in tears and having to take trauma leave, while sneaking word to reporters that it’s not safe to fly.
Air traffic control in the U.S. is a government operation. We’re the greatest nation on the planet, the most important economic and military and cultural power the modern world has ever known — and it’s not close — but this is our government now. It must be working for someone, but it’s not working to keep the planes in the sky.
