Why Do Planes Fall Down From The Sky Every Time Trump Walks By?
Another crash, with accompanying FAA layoffs. Remain calm! All is well!
In another of those coincidences that are starting to feel really damn common, the Trump-Musk administration yesterday slashed more than 300 jobs at the Federal Aviation Agency, the same day as a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis crash-landed on the runway in Toronto. All 76 passengers and four crew members on the plane survived, although 18 were treated for injuries. That’s why they tell you to wear the seat belts!
Video of the crash, taken from the cockpit of a plane on the ground, shows the Delta jet’s right-side landing gear buckling and the plane rolling over onto the ground breaking off the right wing and vertical tail. Lots of fire and smoke at first but fortunately it doesn’t appear to have spread to the cabin.
In case you’re keeping track, this is the fourth or fifth major aircraft crash (depending how you count “major” or if you include only scheduled flights) since Donald Trump took office and the director of the FAA resigned under pressure from Elon Musk, who was pissy about FAA fines and groundings of his rocket ships that keep blowing up.
The emails firing FAA workers went out Friday to “probationary” workers who were hired or transferred to a new position within the agency within two years. (Federal worker protections make shitcanning such employees far easier.) Those told to GTFO worked in areas such as “FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance,” according to an air traffic controller who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
But no worries, folks! Transportation Secretary and reality TV person Sean Duffy explained that it was fewer than 400 workers, out of a “staggering 45,000” total employees, and that “Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.” Clearly, those shitcanned were just a bunch of unneeded dead wood, because who needs working navigational, radar, or landing systems? Trust Elon’s teenagers; they know what they’re doing.
Duffy went on to lie outrageously about his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, claiming that “Mayor Pete chose to use this amazing department—that is so critical to America’s success—as a slush fund for the green new scam and environmental justice nonsense,” and also blamed allowing remote work during COVID somehow: “The building was empty!” Duffy promised that the full record of Buttigieg’s mismanagement would someday be accounted for. You know, once the agency finishes cleaning away the wreckage from the crashes Buttigieg somehow caused during Duffy’s own tenure.
Oh, and in a follow-up, an FAA spox also told the AP that the agency would double check to see whether those workers really did handle “critical” safety functions. As opposed to safety functions we can do without, we guess.
Rolling Stone spoke to two of those fired FAA employees; one worked with a now decimated team that “evaluates many tens of thousands of potential new hazards — such as new buildings, windmills, and especially cranes — to inform flight procedures each year,” not that avoiding crashing into new things on the ground is anything the agency needs to waste taxpayers’ money on. Another is a former employee whose job involved making sure pilots are “medically able and certified to fly, but why would anyone care about a bunch of stupid paperwork that might keep pilots out of the cockpit, or put them back in after a problem is resolved?
Also too, a separate batch of FAA people who were fired had been “working on an urgent and classified early warning radar system the Air Force had announced in 2023 for Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles,” as part of the FAA’s “National Airspace System Defense Program.” We assume missiles from outside the USA are no longer a threat now that Russia, China, and North Korea are all our besties.
The rapid unscheduled disassembly of that workforce meant that fired staffers had no time to pass on institutional knowledge about the systems and why they matter, according to suddenly jobless FAA worker Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, who also told the AP, “I don’t think they even knew what NDP does, they just thought, oh no big deal, he just works for the FAA.”
The positions were supposed to be exempt from layoffs because they involved national security, he said in a LinkedIn post. Then again, he also noted that before he was fired, “the official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” so he was clearly a security threat to the Great Co-Leaders and the nation itself.
Like many other recently fired federal workers, Spitzer-Stadtlander said he’d had excellent performance reviews and was even recommended for a performance-based pay raise in January. He intends to appeal his termination, because he is a low-T troublemaking unnecessary communist bureaucrat who isn’t committed to Sparkle Fascism.
The cause of the Toronto crash has not been determined, although the pilot was advised by a controller that there were winds of 26 miles per hour, with gusts up to 30 mph. There was also blowing snow at the airport, but it will take time to determine th precise cause.
Nevertheless the default assumption from wingnuts is to blame DEI, because those idiots have only one default setting. Heck, Delta even posted an eight-second 2023 TikTok video that included diverse flight crews and ground staff, so even though it wasn’t part of any diversity messaging, the snippet proves that non-Aryans made the plane crash. Besides, Delta even reconfirmed its commitment to diversity last month, meaning no one at the airline even gives any thought to flying anymore.
Weirdos are also dragging up a 2021 statement in which a Delta diversity officer suggested that the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in gate announcements might be modified, saying “We've asked ourselves, 'Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’” We weren’t able to find any evidence that the airline formally forbade the term, although Fox News claimed that a 2024 manual including gender-inclusive language amounted to such a “crackdown.”
Obviously, it’s too early to say what role the firings at FAA may have played in any of the recent crashes, but as president, the buck definitely stops with Trump and his hired idiots. The fact remains that the US had no major airline fatalities between 2009 and January 29, when an Army helicopter hit an American Eagle commuter flight, killing 67. Since then, there’s been that Learjet air ambulance crash in Philadelphia (seven dead including the pediatric patient), a deadly commuter airline crash in Alaska (10 dead), a Japan Airlines plane whose wing sliced into a parked Delta plane in Seattle (no injuries), a commuter jet that taxied into a tow tug at O’Hare in Chicago (tug driver critically injured), a private jet — owned by Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, who wasn’t aboard —that crashed into a parked plane in Phoenix (one dead, three injured), and yesterday’s crash in Toronto, which counts because it took off from America.
Golly, if such a string of deadly disasters and lesser mishaps had occurred under Joe Biden, we’re certain that rightwing media would have been calling for Buttigieg’s head. Like, in addition to their calls for him to be investigated for crashes he clearly caused well after he left the job.
Oh yes, one more thing that should do wonders for Amtrak, bus lines, and private road trips: Duffy also announced yesterday that a team from SpaceX, Elon Musk’s highly-lucrative government contracting concern, will be working with the FAA to fix the nation’s air traffic control system, leading Americans who suspect we’re living inside a really stupid computer simulation to say, “See? SEE?!? I’m NOT CRAZY!”
[AP / AP / Rolling Stone / NBC News / BBC / New York Post]
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Update: I neglected to follow Duffy's gripe that the FAA has "a staggering 45,000 employees" with a joke about how that's nothing, since the Defense Department, with 2.91 million employees, has a staggering leader.
Wonkette regrets the error.
Maybe I wasn’t clear about this.
I wanted more eggs and no plane crash, not many plane crash and no eggs.