Joe Biden, Cause Of And Solution To All Our Air Traffic Problems
A third ATC outage at Newark? Blame Biden!
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has a brilliant plan to deal with continuing problems with the US’s aging air traffic control system and a shortage of air traffic controllers: Blame Joe Biden, and also speed up modernizations and upgrades to the system that began under Biden.
We guess “blame Pete Hegseth” didn’t go over well in the administration.
PREVIOUSLY!
Also, Duffy asked Congress to allocate “lots of billions” of dollars to the Federal Aviation Administration in advance, so the system upgrades can all be paid for in advance. We’ll give Duffy a tiny bit of credit here: He acknowledged that lawmakers have known for decades that the air traffic control (ATC) system is terribly outdated, but they’ve perennially put off paying for the extensive upgrades necessary to fix it. So yeah, calling for a firm commitment of funds in advance is a nice, stopped-clock got something right idea, unlikely though Congress is to follow through.
We will then immediately withdraw the tiny bit of credit we gave Duffy for noticing the source of the problem, because he nonetheless insisted that the country’s current problems with air safety are Biden’s fault. That’s just so much easier than admitting that the core Republican principle of never adequately funding government results in long-term problems. You know, like when Congressman Sean Duffy voted against funding to strengthen the FAA.
Duffy’s latest ritual Biden-blaming comes in the wake of a third equipment fuckup in ATC systems for Newark Liberty International Airport, which are actually run from an FAA center located in Philadelphia. Sunday’s glitch, fortunately, only involved the “momentary failure of a backup system, which prompted a 45-minute ground stop,” but it still caused a cascading series of at least 80 flight cancellations and more than 250 delays, because that’s how tightly all airline flights are scheduled.
Happily, this time controllers could still still see planes on radar and communicate with them by radio; Newark’s string of ATC issues began two weeks ago when both those systems failed for about 90 seconds on April 28, leaving the tower deaf, dumb, and blind, which isn’t even optimal for pinball, let alone air traffic control. That was followed by a second failure of Newark’s radar systems on Friday, again lasting about 90 seconds, although hooray, the radio system stayed online, so we have this amazing artifact to tell the kids about: an air traffic controller advising a FedEx pilot, “Our scopes just went black again. If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure to fix this stuff.”
With the mandatory cool of a big jet pilot, the FedEx captain replies, “Sorry to hear about that. Wish you good luck, guys.” Situation normal, all Trumped up.
On top of the equipment failures, Newark Liberty operations continue to be embuggered by the nation’s long-term shortage of available air traffic controllers. The New York Times reports that although 14 controllers are normally needed on the team running flights out of Newark, there were as few as three controllers scheduled for at least some parts of Monday evening.
Would it be “political” to note all the air traffic controllers sent “please resign immediately” letters and FAA staff Elon Musk fired like he was Ghost Ronald Reagan?
But then, schedules and actual staffing may vary:
The F.A.A. said in a statement to The New York Times that it had at least three controllers scheduled every hour on Monday evening at a Philadelphia facility that manages Newark’s air traffic. But four people familiar with problems at the airport said that the number of fully certified controllers on duty was at times one or two.
Then again, both New York and New Jersey voted for Kamala Harris, so what do they expect? As commuters using the George Washington Bridge learned over a decade ago, bad things can happen to traffic when a petty, vengeful Republican is in office.
Last week, the FAA explained that the systems that went kerflooey probably involved shorts in old copper wiring connecting controllers at the FAA center in Philadelphia with equipment at the control center in Long Island, which resulted in the radar and comms outages for Newark Liberty. Duffy made a big show Monday of announcing that those systems will soon be upgraded with new fiber optic links sometime over the summer, hooray! Acting FAA head Chris Rocheleau said the agency is creating a new emergency task force to keep that all on track, and promised to be “transparent about the progress that we are making.”
At that presser, Duffy blamed Joe Biden for all the problems in Newark and Philadelphia, complaining that the existing system was a “lemon,” and claiming that Biden and previous Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had moved the approach control for Newark to Philadelphia “without properly hardening the telecom lines feeding the data.”
He promised that the FAA would work closely with task force members Verizon and L3Harris — an FAA telecoms contractor — to find out what went wrong with Newark’s flight control systems and to make sure the new fiber optic links are working by the middle of the month.
As far as we can tell, those upgrades Duffy is happily promising seem to be part of a $2.4 billion Verizon FAA modernization contract that was awarded in 2023. That contract was funded out of the $5 billion for modernization already included in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which also included another $20 billion for airport infrastructure. We haven’t been able to definitively nail down that the new fiber upgrades for Newark are part of that Biden-era contract, but Verizon is part of the task force, so … shame on Biden we guess?
Finally, on Thursday, the day before Newark Liberty’s second radar outage, Duffy outlined the Trump administration’s plan for modernizing air traffic control, which mostly consists of cribbing from long-needed system upgrade plans already prepared by the Department of Transportation and FAA under previous presidents and saying “let’s do this, but faster.” We do not wish to shock you, gentle reader, but we fully endorse this approach. Far better for this crowd of idiots to take credit for plans apparently put together by competent people than to try to make up one on their own, possibly by just having Elon Musk do it. (Mind you, it’s still entirely possible the fucklebums may still go that route.)
Duffy’s “plan” for copying off the smarter kids’ homework is pretty ambitious, because the FAA has known for a long time what’s needed to bring its systems into at least the early iPhone era so it’s only a decade or two behind ATC systems in the rest of the world, which is also struggling to keep up with current technology. Duffy wants to move forward existing modernization plans and cram them into just three years, which would be a pretty neat trick if the administration pulls it off, since a September 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that the FAA’s plans could take well into the 2030s to be realized.
The scope of the FAA’s problems, as that report indicates, is daunting, to say the least. The DoT has long sought to upgrade all its legacy computer systems — some control towers still rely on computers that use floppy disks — to modern standards, and to upgrade communication systems running on copper wires to run on fiber optic cables, satellite comms, and wireless networks, so that control towers can finally go fully digital instead of having to rely on paper flight strips to track flight information. (We should probably keep the paper stuff on hand in case the Cylons wipe out all our networked computers.) In addition,
Some 618 aging radar systems, many dating back to the 1970s and well past their intended lifespan, would be replaced under the plan. The FAA also aims to deploy new automation systems to overhaul flight and airspace management, including modernizing traffic flow platforms and consolidating legacy control software.
That’s a lot! And maybe it’ll all get done in three years instead of a decade!
But as the Washington Post explains (gift link), there might be a few hiccups, since Duffy’s borrowed but accelerated plan
provides few details on how the agency would achieve that feat, and Duffy will be attempting to build the system without key career FAA leaders, who are departing en masse in personnel cuts engineered by Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service.
Yeah, that could be a problem, all right.
Still, there’s at least a ghost of a chance that the Republicans in charge of Congress might do at least a little good toward addressing the issue, now that constant problems with air travel are making their constituents very noisily angry. Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved $12.5 billion for ATC upgrades, and who knows, maybe that will stay in the Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires Bill Republicans want to pass by reconciliation. Whether it stays in the bill may depend on what Republicans fear more: Backlash over flight delays and plane crashes, or backlash from Trump voters losing their Medicaid.
[AP / WaPo (gift link) / The Register / CBS News / NYT / GAO / WPVI]
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This turned out to be a bit of an information dump, and I should prolly revise for clarity, but instead I will pin my simple easy post hoc thesis statement, now that I've figured out what it shoulda been:
1) Duffy blames Joe Biden for air traffic control problems that have arisen over decades because "budget hawk" Republicans in Congress refused to fund upgrades and maintenance.
2) Biden actually began to fix many of them, but it was only a down payment, because see #1.
3) Duffy's "plan" is actually just cribbed from an FAA wishlist that COULD work, because the FAA really knows what it needs.
4) But no way in hell will it get finished in 3 years
5) It all depends on Congress funding it, which it won't, because see #1.
Yesterday:
𝐒𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐚’𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐚 ‘𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐓𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐃𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐬’
Today:
𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐚
nothing to see here, move along.