Backtalk JOHN TIERNEY / GUEST COLUMNIST
U.S. Air Traffic Control an International Disgrace
W
e still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an Ameri- can Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport in January.
But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air
traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace. Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest
to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology. The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited
control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that
instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called
flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in
2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in Amer- ican towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is
way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less pre- cise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar. Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and
infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window — which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the land- ing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet. The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to
remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy — the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.
98 NEWSMAX | MARCH 2025 I
n 2017, the Trump administration and Republican con- gressional leadership tried creating a similar system in
the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air traffic control- lers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators,
especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system — and the campaign contributions and pork barrel opportunities that came with it. Now, after the Washington collision, could the second
Trump administration and a new Republican Congress finally create a state-of-the-art system? “The public and opinion leaders now know a lot more
about the FAA’s shortcomings,” says Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, who has been leading the reform cam- paign for five decades. “With DOGE and the Trump administration shaking
things up, perhaps the time for real reform has finally arrived.”
Trump’s executive order in January for a review of avia-
tion safety focused on investigating and eliminating DEI practices in hiring controllers. Unsuccessful applicants for those jobs have sued the
FAA, contending that the agency practiced racial discrimi- nation by introducing a “biographical questionnaire” to favor minorities at the expense of other applicants, includ- ing those better prepared because they had taken college courses in air traffic control. The FAA has now been ordered to scrap identity politics
and hire controllers based strictly on merit. Eliminating diversity mandates is just one small step in
the right direction. The system will remain mired in mid- 20th-century technology until it’s run by an independent corporation accountable to regulators but freed from con- gressional micromanagement, annual budget battles, and the federal bureaucracy’s convoluted hiring and procure- ment regulations.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal. Nearly all other developed countries sensibly separate
these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility.
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