The American aviation system seems to be “near collapse,” amid fatal crashes, crumbling airports, stressed-out air traffic controllers — and the latest sign: hours-long TSA security lines, according to a report in The Atlantic.
The most recent fatal airline crash came Sunday evening when an Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Two pilots were killed and dozens of passengers were injured. The airport has been closed since, though it is expected to reopen Monday afternoon.
“A closure at LaGuardia puts pressure on other airports in the area, and they might not be prepared to handle any redirects,” The Atlantic noted. “This morning, reports of smoke in the air-traffic-control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport, just across the Hudson River from New York City, caused a brief ground stop. Officials determined the problem was a burning smell in an elevator and reopened the tower, but this is only the latest sign of how broken Newark airport is.”
There are other examples of a system in crisis.
“Last week, an Alaska Airlines plane nearly crashed into a FedEx plane on a runway at Newark, missing by just 300 to 325 feet, after pilots were instructed to avoid a collision. And earlier this month, a Singapore Airlines plane clipped the wing of a Spirit Airlines jet while pushing back from a gate. Last spring, air-traffic controllers lost the ability to track planes at Newark for two brief intervals, causing such stress that some of them took leave.”
Describing a system that is “quietly eroding from within,” The Atlantic’s David A. Graham blames “years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction.”
Graham also pointed to the FAA’s abrupt closure of the El Paso, Texas airport recently amid a standoff with the Department of Defense. And last January’s collision of an Army helicopter with an American Airlines jet — which President Trump quickly blamed on “DEI.”
Trump has now deployed ICE agents to at least a dozen airports across the country, purportedly to assist TSA agents, who have not been paid since Valentine’s Day as a partial government shutdown lingers and Trump refuses a bipartisan plan to quickly fund all DHS agencies except ICE.
Agents’ numbers are dwindling as call-outs increase over the weeks-long crisis.
Graham calls Trump deploying ICE agents to airports “a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed ‘kludgeocracy,’ in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform.”
Should his deployment of ICE agents not work, the president has another solution: if ICE is not sufficient at the airports, he says he will “bring in the National Guard.”