I'm not saying the article's thesis is wrong, much of it rings true to me, but we have very comprehensive data and statistics concerning air travel so I'm deeply unimpressed by this article instead hanging its argument on a hodgepodge list of incidents instead of digging into the data to get some proper numbers.
We have "proper numbers" for the full range of issues covered in the essay? From airport aesthetics to El Paso being shut down because of lack of coordination around anti-drone testing, or something?
The article is not just about safety, or some other singular topic with clear statistics.
Just because this sentiment will get some cheap upvotes from people who didn't engage with the article doesn't be that the author should have searched for keys under streetlights to provide a false appearance of rigor.
This is an essay from the Atlantic Daily, which is responding, in real time, to the events of the day. It's a minor work of commentary, it is not supposed to be in-depth reporting, and it's bit odd to feel ought to have been a work of investigative reporting, which the Atlantic also does, seperately.
Safety / incident data collection and publishing from the FAA and NTSB are basically live, you'll get incidents logged within days at most and preliminary reports usually within a few weeks. What lags the most are data analysis and interpretations, but major newspapers should probably be prepared to do their own data analysis if they're making grand proclaiments like the collapse of an industry...
This is a common kind of "data or nothing" fallacy. Data doesn't reliably capture evidence for the thesis "TSA agents and aviation workers are burning out and ICE is going to make it worse". The part that data is good for hasn't happened yet over a long enough timeline to reflect properly.
If the argument is "deadly accidents are up over the past decade", then yes, of course, we must point to data.
If the argument is, "the aviation industry might be on the verge of a steep decline in availability and/or safety due to recent political/financial problems", then what do you mean "show the data"? That doesn't make sense. It's a concern based on observation, which is fine if it's not presented as a fact.
And if it turns out that a specific accident is due to said forces - what, we don't address those forces, because "data"?
I agree, but the article does specifically mention crashes as a symptom we're already seeing:
> Fatal crashes, overstressed controllers, and endless security lines reveal a system teetering on the brink of failure.
I have not read the entire article (paywalled), but the introduction sure seems to strongly imply that we're already seeing an unusually high rate of crashes.
"Collapse" isn't within the statistical distribution though, so you'd still to apply judgement in any case.
I suppose it's a word with many definitions.
1. Not really. If the crash rates we're seeing under the Trump administration are higher than any similar length period in the last ~10 years, we should start to worry.
You absolutely can see a difference. [0] The term of art is "Runway Incursions", and the stats definitely show our airports are working at the limits of safety.
Category A and B incursions increased by 2.8σ. Further, it was 7 years of increases in a row. Either factor on its own would indicate a process out of statistical control.
Well, a tired, overextended air traffic controller at LaGuardia just caused two pilots to die last night while landing. How many deaths would communicate "We have likely reached system failure"? I presume for some, it's going to have to be a few airframes worth of passengers unfortunately. There is a shortage of air traffic controllers. Those working are being pushed to failure. The system as a whole is degrading. These are facts, based on evidence and observations.
There is currently a shortage of ~3k controllers (as of this comment), and the time to train and put new controllers into service is significant. Excess retirements reduces time to system failure due to labor shortages.
https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
> Entry-level applicants must complete required training courses and spend several months at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. Applicants are paid while in training. After graduating the academy, individuals are placed in locations across the country and must gain 2-3 years additional training, both classroom and on-the-job experience, before becoming a certified professional controller. This rigorous training includes close supervision and evaluation by senior controllers that ensures controllers are competent, professional, know their airspace environment and can deal with the pressures and high pace of the job.
Controllers in training quit due to a lack of pay whenever a government shutdown occurs. This impairs the talent pipeline to improve system performance anytime a shutdown occurs.
> The shutdown is having real consequences, as some students at the controller academy have already decided to abandon the profession because they don’t want to work in a job they won’t be paid for, Duffy said. That will only make it harder for the FAA to hire enough controllers to eliminate the shortage, since training takes years. He said that the government is only a week or two away from running out of money to pay students at the academy.
> “Currently nearly 50 percent of major air traffic control facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 90 percent of air traffic controllers are out at New York–area facilities,” the FAA said in a statement posted on X on Friday evening.
> How many deaths would communicate "We have likely reached system failure"?
"Failure" is really a matter of opinion rather than some objective tipping point. The air system is unlikely to ever actually "fail", and at worst will just become some arbitrary level of degraded that some people will loudly label "failed".
There are plenty of examples around the world of countries with variously degraded air systems, that are far worse than the US status quo but still are not "failed".
>Yemen, in the midst of a perennial civil war, still runs commercial flights
Not any more, they don't:
> The General Director of Sanaa International Airport, Khaled al-Shaief, said in a post on his X account that the strike had completely destroyed the last of the civilian planes that Yemenia Airways was operating from the airport.
Note also that they deliberately choke off the hiring funnel before they even get applicants, and deliberately dispose of experienced controllers. Air traffic controller applicants must be under 31 years old for initial hire. The mandatory retirement age is 56. Although there are limited exceptions to both rules.
Air traffic controllers require a significant investment by the federal government, I take no issue with age limits for both investment (lower bound) and safety reasons (upper bound) (if the data says it is reasonable, I'll always defer to the data).
I take exceptional issue with the fact that their pay is not considered essential. There should be no way for this critical infrastructure to be not considered essential. ATC pay should flow regardless of actions of any branch of the federal government, and there should be robust systems in place to ensure these workers are not pushed beyond reasonable work limits. Fix the system or break the system forcing a fix. If it continues to work "good enough" without a fix, no changes will be made.
I'm curious: If your boss emailed you and all of your coworkers with mass buyout offers and demanded that they quit their job how many do you think would take up the offer? 10%? 20%? Do you think it would be enough to cause significant organizational issues?
Problems related to air traffic controllers and TSA staff aren't a sign of "american aviation" being near collapse - they are a sign of american goverment being near collapse. This is critical national infrastructure - stop playing stupid political games with it.
I am amazed every day that people are expected to turn up every day to work while being unpaid. In westminster-style parlimentary systems, if a government can't guarantee supply[1], they are sacked, and a snap election is called.
The paralysis of the political system in the US is either a feature or a bug depending on your point of view i suppose, but no question that it is entirely dysfunctional that a government can continue existing if it can't pass a budget.
The final paragraph is maybe the most relevant. It goes well beyond just aviation. I'm sure we've all felt this.
> The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written, “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.” The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.
This is largely true for almost all US public services. Decades of focusing on the needs of the 1% is producing a situation where almost everything is under funded or poorly implemented. Critical infrastructure isn't a priority.
A lot of core services in the US are near collapse, because society focuses on short-term value extraction, over long term success. If you look at the US's history, there was a much better balance between the two (with the core being seen as a lever towards future wealth).
You see this in education, infrastructure, public health, scientific research, housing, and energy. All foundational systems of a society, which compound the value of everything else, but they aren't immediate profit centers so kick the ball down the road.
It is an attitude problem first and foremost; and I'm not sure how you fix that.
PS - This also impacts private enterprise, like corporations. Enshittify their current offerings for the next quarter bump but ruin their brand reputation/long-term viability.
I am flying from SFO -> DEN in a few days and I see that Denver wait time is 4 minutes and, as is well known, SFO does not use TSA or federal security staff.
Denver does, however, so I wonder why there is no wait at DEN and hundreds of minutes at Houston/Atlanta/JFK ?
This is not news, there was an episode of Last Week Tonight on the Air Traffic Control crisis last summer[0].
From memory: on the human side airports are understaffed, there are no young controllers in the pipeline, attrition is high, and the less people are available the higher the burnout rate, which creates a vicious cycle. On the technical side, airports are unmaintained, systems are obsolete and crumbling.
John Oliver makes the case that most of the issue is that the FAA is financed through discretionary spending so e.g. it's subject to shut downs and can't do long term planning.
- deregulation of airlines in the 1980s led to rampant consolidation of routes and SPOF hubs that only work for revenue purposes and offer no real resilience in traffic planning. over-subscription of flights and lack of any real competition compounds this issue.
- climate change and global warming increasingly exacerbate severe weather conditions that ground aircraft and incur delays or cancellations in an already fragile system
- reagan-era policy hostile toward air traffic control labor unions that once checked the excesses of capital resulted in understaffing issues for more than two decades later. poor regulation of working hours, outmoded systems, and wage stagnation has further stressed the ATC system.
- the partial government shutdown has caused massive delays and cancellations of flights as the artifice of security theater begins to break down under its own political morass.
the solution is reform and regulation through policy change and investment. this is not possible in late stage capitalism (Streeck, 2016.)
Just a standard warning to readers: when you use an archive.ph (or other archive.today) link, you risk your computer's resources being used to participate in a DDOS against another web site, as reported/discussed recently on HN[1].
People who dedicate their lives to studying an industry, can get very good at being able to predict the probability of events in their domain.
These same people are commonly off by orders of magnitude when predicting the magnitude of these same events.
The author of this article won the "Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting". I'm going to infer from this, that he's better at political reporting, than he is at predicting the future of an entire industry.
And if he is truly convinced of this outcome, he should be shorting the airlines. (I'm gonna guess he hasn't done that).
106 comments
The article is not just about safety, or some other singular topic with clear statistics.
Just because this sentiment will get some cheap upvotes from people who didn't engage with the article doesn't be that the author should have searched for keys under streetlights to provide a false appearance of rigor.
This is an essay from the Atlantic Daily, which is responding, in real time, to the events of the day. It's a minor work of commentary, it is not supposed to be in-depth reporting, and it's bit odd to feel ought to have been a work of investigative reporting, which the Atlantic also does, seperately.
> but we have very comprehensive data and statistics concerning air travel
somehow I feel like conditions may have changed since that data was collected. just a hunch.
If the argument is "deadly accidents are up over the past decade", then yes, of course, we must point to data.
If the argument is, "the aviation industry might be on the verge of a steep decline in availability and/or safety due to recent political/financial problems", then what do you mean "show the data"? That doesn't make sense. It's a concern based on observation, which is fine if it's not presented as a fact.
And if it turns out that a specific accident is due to said forces - what, we don't address those forces, because "data"?
> Fatal crashes, overstressed controllers, and endless security lines reveal a system teetering on the brink of failure.
I have not read the entire article (paywalled), but the introduction sure seems to strongly imply that we're already seeing an unusually high rate of crashes.
"Rigor cleans the window through which intuition shines" - Ellis Cooper
> "Collapse" isn't within the statistical distribution though
Uh? Maybe you could explain what you mean by this a bit more.
2. "System collapse" would be unexplored territory, so how would statistical analysis be able to infer when it occurs?
2. See above.
Yes, there is universal data out there. But those events are so rare that you almost never can differentiate a normal year from an abnormal one.
[0]: https://www.buckycountry.com/2025/09/22/runway-close-calls-u...
What statistical conclusion are you taking from it?
There is currently a shortage of ~3k controllers (as of this comment), and the time to train and put new controllers into service is significant. Excess retirements reduces time to system failure due to labor shortages. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
> Entry-level applicants must complete required training courses and spend several months at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. Applicants are paid while in training. After graduating the academy, individuals are placed in locations across the country and must gain 2-3 years additional training, both classroom and on-the-job experience, before becoming a certified professional controller. This rigorous training includes close supervision and evaluation by senior controllers that ensures controllers are competent, professional, know their airspace environment and can deal with the pressures and high pace of the job.
Controllers in training quit due to a lack of pay whenever a government shutdown occurs. This impairs the talent pipeline to improve system performance anytime a shutdown occurs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newyorkcity/comments/1s1eh14/i_mess...
US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860865 - November 2025 (365 comments)
Flights to Los Angeles Airport halted due to air traffic controller shortage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45715771 - October 2025 (11 comments)
> The shutdown is having real consequences, as some students at the controller academy have already decided to abandon the profession because they don’t want to work in a job they won’t be paid for, Duffy said. That will only make it harder for the FAA to hire enough controllers to eliminate the shortage, since training takes years. He said that the government is only a week or two away from running out of money to pay students at the academy.
Air traffic controller shortages cause widespread flight delays amid government shutdown - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/air-traffic-controller-... - November 1st, 2025
> “Currently nearly 50 percent of major air traffic control facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 90 percent of air traffic controllers are out at New York–area facilities,” the FAA said in a statement posted on X on Friday evening.
Do you feel lucky?
> How many deaths would communicate "We have likely reached system failure"?
"Failure" is really a matter of opinion rather than some objective tipping point. The air system is unlikely to ever actually "fail", and at worst will just become some arbitrary level of degraded that some people will loudly label "failed".
There are plenty of examples around the world of countries with variously degraded air systems, that are far worse than the US status quo but still are not "failed".
There's Egypt, which has labeled crashes caused by bad design as "someone used a bomb and blew it up" for political reasons: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/07/fire-not-bomb-...
Yemen, in the midst of a perennial civil war, still runs commercial flights: https://www.pprune.org/terms-endearment/653181-yemenia-expat...
Russia, with airplane parts sacntioned for years, still runs commercial flights.
Even if the US undergoes a USSR-style sudden collapse, the aviation system is not going to "fail" in the sense of completely breaking and stopping.
>Yemen, in the midst of a perennial civil war, still runs commercial flights
Not any more, they don't:
> The General Director of Sanaa International Airport, Khaled al-Shaief, said in a post on his X account that the strike had completely destroyed the last of the civilian planes that Yemenia Airways was operating from the airport.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-has...
LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503965 - March 2026
I take exceptional issue with the fact that their pay is not considered essential. There should be no way for this critical infrastructure to be not considered essential. ATC pay should flow regardless of actions of any branch of the federal government, and there should be robust systems in place to ensure these workers are not pushed beyond reasonable work limits. Fix the system or break the system forcing a fix. If it continues to work "good enough" without a fix, no changes will be made.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_and_supply
The paralysis of the political system in the US is either a feature or a bug depending on your point of view i suppose, but no question that it is entirely dysfunctional that a government can continue existing if it can't pass a budget.
> The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written, “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.” The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.
You see this in education, infrastructure, public health, scientific research, housing, and energy. All foundational systems of a society, which compound the value of everything else, but they aren't immediate profit centers so kick the ball down the road.
It is an attitude problem first and foremost; and I'm not sure how you fix that.
PS - This also impacts private enterprise, like corporations. Enshittify their current offerings for the next quarter bump but ruin their brand reputation/long-term viability.
>" A careful, iterative process of safety regulation culminated in a 16-year period, from 2009 to 2025, when no U.S. airline had a fatal crash."
This is quite amazing
Denver does, however, so I wonder why there is no wait at DEN and hundreds of minutes at Houston/Atlanta/JFK ?
From memory: on the human side airports are understaffed, there are no young controllers in the pipeline, attrition is high, and the less people are available the higher the burnout rate, which creates a vicious cycle. On the technical side, airports are unmaintained, systems are obsolete and crumbling.
John Oliver makes the case that most of the issue is that the FAA is financed through discretionary spending so e.g. it's subject to shut downs and can't do long term planning.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k
- deregulation of airlines in the 1980s led to rampant consolidation of routes and SPOF hubs that only work for revenue purposes and offer no real resilience in traffic planning. over-subscription of flights and lack of any real competition compounds this issue.
- climate change and global warming increasingly exacerbate severe weather conditions that ground aircraft and incur delays or cancellations in an already fragile system
- reagan-era policy hostile toward air traffic control labor unions that once checked the excesses of capital resulted in understaffing issues for more than two decades later. poor regulation of working hours, outmoded systems, and wage stagnation has further stressed the ATC system.
- the partial government shutdown has caused massive delays and cancellations of flights as the artifice of security theater begins to break down under its own political morass.
the solution is reform and regulation through policy change and investment. this is not possible in late stage capitalism (Streeck, 2016.)
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740
These same people are commonly off by orders of magnitude when predicting the magnitude of these same events.
The author of this article won the "Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting". I'm going to infer from this, that he's better at political reporting, than he is at predicting the future of an entire industry.
And if he is truly convinced of this outcome, he should be shorting the airlines. (I'm gonna guess he hasn't done that).
(edit: syntax)