The FAA administrator left his post after Musk asked him to, on January 20. The FAA had no administrator until Trump appointed one, only after the plane and helicopter crashed into the Potomac. The lack of leadership at the FAA could not have helped the situation, even if it was not a direct cause of it.
> Air traffic controllers were emailed by the Trump administration urging them to quit their jobs and take mass “buyouts” just 24 hours after the D.C. plane crash. They were among hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent the email at 8.30 p.m. Thursday to push the extraordinary offer by Trump’s aides to get civil servants to quit en masse. The email dropped almost exactly 24 hours after an Army helicopter crashed into an American Airlines jet as it came into land at Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people. Just one air traffic controller was doing the work of two controllers at the time, early reports have suggested.
The ATC labor force was already stretched thin before this. Tired, overworked humans make mistakes. There is no slack in the system, and it's being pushed further towards failure. Safe travels.
Keep in mind that even getting an email like this is quite implicitly distressing.
This being sent out to all ATC controllers means that you added an extra, unnecessary amount of uncertainty into their lives and that will directly translate to their work.
Is this all real? We are headed into blatant corporate fascism. This is very scary stuff.
Looking this stuff up, apparently it's now being reported that Musk has taken over the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration.
You are saying essentially that the authority in question was incredibly mismanaged and incapable if its staff would perform worse in their critical functions just because of some personnel changes at the top a few days prior.
So not only does this happen in any organization (instability leads to a decrease in over-all performance), but you're being REALLY dishonest by acting like this was the only thing the Trump admin did. Trump not only shut down multiple parts of the federal government but is actively trying to get people to quit. See: https://www.opm.gov/fork.
Sutely, when there is a head of the FAA, that person occasionally takes a vacation or other time off. These plane crashes are totally unrelated to politics or staffing.
> Staffing Was ‘Not Normal’ at Reagan Airport Tower, According to F.A.A. Report
> The report, reviewed by The New York Times, said that one controller was communicating with both helicopters and planes. Those jobs are typically assigned to two people, not one.
So are you saying is the FAA didn't have enough controllers to keep the skies safe, ultimately leading to this week's collision? That sounds like a very strong reason to fire whoever is the head of that agency.
Vacations are often planned with responsibilities delegated.
If the head of a company gets pushed out because the richest man in the world has a vendetta against that company (in this case the FAA was trying to fine SpaceX and upset Musk) that can cause strife within in the company, especially when that same person writes an email (fork in the road is language Musk used in very similar emails he's sent in the past) telling you that you should quit.
I'd agree, if there was no head of the agency for many months, confusion and lack of direction would drift down and be disruptive. But 8 days after he left? That's equivalent to a vacation, and, as you noted, people manage just fine.
I'll revise my earlier statement. It has nothing to do with the staffing of the agency's head. Yes, if there were not enough traffic controllers, that's indeed a staffing problem. But if the former head of the agency let that go on, putting air safety at risk, then he deserved to be fired.
If the CEO of a corporation is absent does all the mid and bottom level stuff just stop working? FAA may have been headless but the head never really had anything to do with the people getting stuff done.
By real knowledge of the problem domain. I know that sort of argumentation is unpopular, but it’s genuinely correct in this case.
If anything, this incident has been predicted and warned for years and years and years, and is an indictment of FAA and ATC policy over the last couple decades, accelerating over the last 2-8 years or so.
The reason we can assume there’s no connection between the new administration and this incident is… because there’s no reason to make that assumption, based on the reality of ATC policy, (lack of) changes in the problem domain, and longstanding known risks in the status quo.
> In April 2023, Whitaker grounded SpaceX for months after Starship’s maiden launch and only allowed a second attempt after an extensive investigation lasting until September of that year yielded 63 corrective actions to be taken.
> “He needs to resign,” Musk wrote late last year, in response to one of his fans criticizing what he believed to be the FAA’s unwarranted meddling in the entrepreneur’s affairs.
It is just sad that American voters have given Musk, who is running a ponzi scheme based on "FSD" that regularly kills people, the license to gut FAA. And immediately we have the first on air collision in 16 years.
Nobody is going to be left to scrutinize anything much less have any power to do anything about it. If anyone is still doubting that we're under a full scale takeover of our country, get your head out of your ass.
Twenty-odd years ago there was a rash of US politicians killed in aircraft accidents. This seems like a good source — look at the cluster in late 90s, early 00s - https://politicalgraveyard.com/death/aircraft.html
Very few since then, so it’s much more of an outlier now.
I'd argue that the fact that it isn't frequent makes it insignificant. 40k people die every year on the roads and, to our detriment, we don't treat that as significant. I wish we would focus on things actually impacting people and not scare people with things that will never happen to them.
Anybody got statistics on air crashes in the US so we can see if the anomaly is only in the attention the crashes receive and not the frequency at which they are happening?
