The Deeper Airport Disaster
Today on TAP: Everything from interminable lines to near-miss collisions and controller burnout predates Trump. It’s a metaphor for the long-term neglect of public systems.
https://prospect.org/2026/03/25/deeper-airport-disaster-tsa-air-traffic-controllers-laguardia-crash/
For every actual disaster such as the collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late Sunday night, there are dozens of close calls. The force of air traffic controllers has been seriously understaffed for decades. The damage dates all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, in 1981.
Pete Buttigieg, as President Biden’s transportation secretary, had four years to fix this shortfall. While hiring did increase, as of the end of 2024 staffing was still below 2016 levels as the number of flights increased. Some 40 percent of the nation’s 290 FAA-controlled terminals were categorized as understaffed, 76 of them by more than 20 percent.
Needless to say, thanks to DOGE and periodic government shutdowns, conditions for controllers have only worsened under Trump. Retirements have increased. As of late 2025, 77 percent of the busiest airports were staffed below the FAA’s 85 percent safety threshold.
LaGuardia has 33 controllers, out of a goal of 37, which sounds not too bad. But as the FAA has had trouble recruiting, training, and retaining controllers, the agency moves the goalposts by setting targets that are themselves inadequate.
Our friend Jim Fallows, who pilots his own plane and is a buff about all things having to do with flying, did the deepest postmortem on exactly what happened at LaGuardia. He reported on his Substack that a single controller was performing multiple operations, each of which required intense concentration.
More at link.
So much of this overall shit was started by Reagan! My humble opinion.
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