The Federal Aviation Administration says flights departing for Los Angeles International Airport were halted briefly due to a staffing shortage at a Southern California air traffic facility.
Don’t assume trump and his ilk will do the intelligent thing, they will always do the capricious vengeful thing.
As I’ve been trying to get at, that’s irrelevant. No, pulling military ATC does not work. 9k isn’t enough when 13k is already anemic. And what are the military air installations supposed to do without ATC?
Shutting down airports only highlights the problem. The airlines won’t survive that for long. Everything they could possibly try has natural consequences. It’s not a court imposing an order. It’s not congress finding its spine. It’s reality.
Edit: is there even a single military airport more complicated than Chicago Midway? Running a major hub may well be outside their training.
I don’t have numbers, but there are tons of tiny regional airports. The kind that have only a handful of flights a day. But they all still need ATC right. I bet you can halve the need by just shutting those down. A small number of people will have to drive further to catch a flight.
There are small, untowered airports, but they usually aren’t equipped for large jets, or for IFR landings (“instrument flight rules,” which is when the pilot relies on instrumentation instead of visually looking outside, such as during inclement weather.)
Small planes depending on VFR (visual flight rules) can probably plan flights to avoid towered airports. But the big commercial flights will be in trouble.
It’d almost have to be the opposite. Military ATC aren’t used to dealing with the same kind of traffic levels as civilian ATC. Even Chicago Midway might be pushing it.
Because reality has stopped these people from implementing their plan already? That’s not how it works under authoritarians. The cruelty will be the point. Any airline who complains will get hit with fines or shuttered. They will shut down airports in democrat areas and keep the republican ones open.
They don’t give two shits about reality when they can just have their media lie about it.
They can try as much as they like. The airports are still getting shut down. Airlines will bleed money. There is no way out of that if ATC go on strike, illegal or not. You bargain with them or you fail.
And yeah, they do get stopped by reality all the time. They tried to fire a whole lot of people in the federal government. Then realized that a lot of those people absolutely must do certain jobs, like oversight of nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Just after the election, I argued with someone trying to make that same point about Project 2025. I argued that because of reality getting in the way, they couldn’t implement half of it. Guess where the Project 2025 Tracker has been stuck at for months? I actually didn’t expect to be so literally correct, but that’s what happened.
Yes, reality matters no matter how authoritarian the system is. Trump can no more do this than proclaim that Stephen Miller can jump off the Washington Monument and fly (no matter how much I might enjoy seeing that happen).
As I’ve been trying to get at, that’s irrelevant. No, pulling military ATC does not work. 9k isn’t enough when 13k is already anemic. And what are the military air installations supposed to do without ATC?
Shutting down airports only highlights the problem. The airlines won’t survive that for long. Everything they could possibly try has natural consequences. It’s not a court imposing an order. It’s not congress finding its spine. It’s reality.
Edit: is there even a single military airport more complicated than Chicago Midway? Running a major hub may well be outside their training.
I don’t have numbers, but there are tons of tiny regional airports. The kind that have only a handful of flights a day. But they all still need ATC right. I bet you can halve the need by just shutting those down. A small number of people will have to drive further to catch a flight.
There are small, untowered airports, but they usually aren’t equipped for large jets, or for IFR landings (“instrument flight rules,” which is when the pilot relies on instrumentation instead of visually looking outside, such as during inclement weather.)
Small planes depending on VFR (visual flight rules) can probably plan flights to avoid towered airports. But the big commercial flights will be in trouble.
It’d almost have to be the opposite. Military ATC aren’t used to dealing with the same kind of traffic levels as civilian ATC. Even Chicago Midway might be pushing it.
Because reality has stopped these people from implementing their plan already? That’s not how it works under authoritarians. The cruelty will be the point. Any airline who complains will get hit with fines or shuttered. They will shut down airports in democrat areas and keep the republican ones open.
They don’t give two shits about reality when they can just have their media lie about it.
They can try as much as they like. The airports are still getting shut down. Airlines will bleed money. There is no way out of that if ATC go on strike, illegal or not. You bargain with them or you fail.
And yeah, they do get stopped by reality all the time. They tried to fire a whole lot of people in the federal government. Then realized that a lot of those people absolutely must do certain jobs, like oversight of nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Just after the election, I argued with someone trying to make that same point about Project 2025. I argued that because of reality getting in the way, they couldn’t implement half of it. Guess where the Project 2025 Tracker has been stuck at for months? I actually didn’t expect to be so literally correct, but that’s what happened.
Yes, reality matters no matter how authoritarian the system is. Trump can no more do this than proclaim that Stephen Miller can jump off the Washington Monument and fly (no matter how much I might enjoy seeing that happen).
We will just have to agree to disagree and see who’s right in a few months or years.