Donald Trump has been in office for less than four months, not enough time to be the prime source of damage to the air traffic control system. His administration fired some 400 key safety and technical staff at the FAA. But the failure to adequately invest in airport infrastructure and trained personnel has been going on for more than 40 years. To be precise, it dates to Ronald Reagan’s assault on the air traffic controllers’ union, known as PATCO, in 1981. What’s more, that single act was only the beginning of failed policy, by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. It’s one more aspect of America’s disinvestment in public infrastructure and public systems. The Biden administration made a good start in addressing that shortfall, but only a start. Trump and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, yet another senior official from Fox News, are now making things much worse. We have been incredibly lucky in that there have been relatively few fatal crashes of late, despite a lot of near misses. The recent crashes and the three communications outages that forced the temporary shutdown of Newark Airport and the cancellation of flights are the fruits of decades of failed policy, and worse is likely to come. According to Bill McGee of the American Economic Liberties Project, the most knowledgeable critic of failed policies on airline regulation and air traffic control, there are about three times as many flights as in 1985, but roughly the same number of air traffic controllers, creating extreme shortages. The mess at Newark was partly the result of controllers being transferred on an emergency basis to Philadelphia. Even worse, as McGee points out, is the crazy quilt of technical systems for air
traffic control that are decades behind their European counterparts. Some airports use antiquated radar for air traffic control, while others use satellites. At the same airport, some runways rely on radar while others rely on satellites. Incredibly, in some cases the same runway uses different technical communications systems depending on which direction a plane lands. "There are about 500 commercial airports in the United States," McGee says. "Each one is different. It’s a patchwork."
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