I want to talk about a recent article in The New York Times titled “Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known.”
The article notes that “[t]here has not been a fatal crash involving a major U.S. airline since February 2009, when a Continental flight crashed into a house near Buffalo, killing all 49 people on board. The 14-year streak is the longest in the history of U.S. aviation.”
However ...
- The article also reveals that “close calls involving commercial airlines have been happening, on average, multiple times a week” throughout 2023.
- These near misses “have involved all major U.S. airlines and have happened nationwide.”
- The biggest factor in these close calls “is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed.”
- In fact, the article reports that only 3 of our country’s 313 air traffic control facilities have as many fully certified controllers as they should have according to targets set by officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and the controllers’ union.
- In other words, 310 out of 313 air traffic control facilities in America are understaffed!
- This staffing shortage dates all the way back to 1981, when then-President Ronald Reagan infamously fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers.
- More recently, during the COVID-19 “pandemic, many controllers left, and the FAA slowed the pace of training new ones because of health restrictions.”
- Another major factor “is that despite repeated recommendations from safety authorities, the vast majority of U.S. airports have not installed warning systems to help prevent collisions on runways.”
- As the article notes, while there are over 500 airports in the U.S. that handle commercial flights, only 43 have such systems.
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