Weird to claim that the rumors are “false” when Pete Buttigieg himself acknowledged that they had to “address” a problem. Yeah, the shipments were unblocked after they modified the TFR that was blocking the shipments. Good on them for fixing it. But that doesn’t mean that the claims of being blocked were wrong.
Cite?
Literally your own link.
Glad we could address —thanks for engaging.
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) October 4, 2024
The Biden-Harris Administration is delivering additional emergency relief to South Carolina to restore roads and bridges damaged by Hurricane Helene.
More relief is on the way, and we will continue to support every affected community as they rebuild and recover.
That is what you linked to? From my link-
The Biden-Harris Administration is delivering additional emergency relief to South Carolina to restore roads and bridges damaged by Hurricane Helene.
More relief is on the way, and we will continue to support every affected community as they rebuild and recover.
You mean Petes message-
Glad we could address —thanks for engaging. How does that confirm-
It doesnt. It just was Buttigieg saying “thanks for engaging” - in no way did Buttigieg acknowledge that the shipments were blocked.
What are you on about? Those are statements about the Feds delivering aid. We’re talking about whether private flights are being blocked.
In a trivial sense it’s 100% true. There is (or was–I haven’t checked) a TFR in place that put restrictions on flights. Any that didn’t abide by the rules were blocked. So yes, quite obviously some flights were blocked.
The question is whether the restrictions were significant enough to block legitimate aid fights. And by all accounts that was true of the Starlink deliveries before the TFR modification.
Incredible that in a seven-word sentence, you could still manage to strip out the relevant part.
There would be nothing for Buttigieg to “address” if there hadn’t been a problem.
Yeah, that is politician talk- he was 'addressing" Musks bogus complaint by saying nothing was blocked.
That is not saying that FEMA was blocking outside aid. This is normal- you dont fly into a disaster area without an authorized flight plan. That is just a safety reg. All you gotta do if file the proper requests, plans etc, and you can help all you want to, but not you can’t go flying willy-nilly into an area with military aircraft, emergency aircraft and news aircraft flying around in a busy airspace.
If FEMA/FAA rules are restrictive enough that an authorized flight plan is impossible, then they are effectively blocking aid. This obviously comes in degrees. We probably want people like in the OP to be blocked. But we probably also don’t want Starlink flights to be blocked due to arbitrary TFR clauses.
Yeah, because freaking Pete Buttigieg has an interest in providing political cover for Musk. Uh huh.
He would not have said they addressed anything if there was nothing to actually address.
We don’t even know how long they were blocked for. It could have been a 20 minute phone call, an extra form to fill out, and a 15 minute signature and release cycle, for all we know. All it might have taken was for someone to tell Musk “seems there’s a delay, some restrictions that need clarification” and he took to Twitter and complained. Buttigeig may have done nothing more than call someone at the FAA, find out “yeah, we’re on it” and that was it.
Buttigeig is not the FAA Administrator and he doesn’t have the ability to change the TFR; that person in Michael Whitaker and he has broad powers to approve emergency regulations and such (and delegate some to others within the FAA; the whole system worldwide operated on a system of delegation and oversight).
I’m just not sure it’s as dramatic as Musk made it sound, because it’s in his interest to be dramatic about shit.
If this truely was causing issues for Joe Anyone or other aid organizations, I do believe it would have been rectified as well. Each waiver is handled case by case, so individual requests were possibly being authorized while the general restrictions were modified.
IMO the real issue here isn’t that there was a TFR whose boilerplate terms didn’t match what Starlink was trying to do.
The real issue is the propaganda machine that has turned an ordinary administrative issue in a chaotic situation into some kind of engineered plot by the federal government to harm the (white & right-leaning) citizens of North Carolina.
The latter is pure fabrication by the propaganda trolls being paid to destroy our country. And like most of those fabrications, there’s a tiny dust mote of reality sorta near where the center of the boulder of bullshit has been carefully piled up and rolled downhill into the social media echo-space where it splatters all over everything.
Harping on the reality of the dustmote only serves the propaganda trolls. Just don’t do it.
Oh sure, that’s perfectly fair. Quite possibly it would have been resolved in relatively short order via other means. That said, it was a disaster where hours matter. Getting procedural problems resolved quickly can make a difference.
True, though the Secretary does have very broad waiver powers. He can just snap his fingers and authorize a rocket launch, for instance, independent of an FAA license.
I think it’s worth noting that TFRs go up for far less noteworthy events than natural disasters. Every time the president sets foot in public there is a 30nm flight restriction which means a lot of private pilots can’t fly. There are also permanent restrictions that make operating out of the smaller Washington DC airports onerous as hell.
Now I realize we’re talking about people trying to participate in rescue operations, not folks unable to take their Cessna 150 for a $100 hamburger because a VIP decided to visit a bagel shop. But my point is, we should be properly annoyed at a lot of those more mundane flight restrictions before we bitch about metering and monitoring traffic in a hazardous area.
I haven’t researched it in depth, but I don’t believe most other countries restrict air traffic in the way we do when their leaders travel (then again, we do have a much more free system of visual rules flying than most places). Maybe it’s bad timing for me to say this with one candidate having survived two assassination attempts recently, but I think we go a little overboard with presidential TFRs. It’s affected me as a pilot more than once, including a time I had to take passengers to an extra stop to undergo enhanced screening.
All this to say, I have no problem with the FAA administering a TFR for a disaster area to ensure safe rescue operations. I have a bigger problem with other kinds of flight restrictions that get thrown up all the time.
Except that they are NOT that restrictive. It is required that people properly ask permission prior to entering such an airspace. It is required that people properly ask permission when answering a need might or requires bending the rules. This is not an arduous process, but it is a required one.
Right, let’s just blast a rocket through airspace without any warning whatsoever, what could possibly go wrong… 
A rocket launch requires a TFR. Even hobbyists launching rockets to a relatively low altitude requires FAA clearance and informing other users of nearby airspace. Why? Because no one wants rocket and aircraft parts raining down out of the sky.
You’re complaining about traffic rules. It’s like complaining about having traffic lights, signs, and signals. It’s like complaining about flagmen and police routing people around an accident site or having them temporarily drive on the wrong side of the road to evade a hazard - something you normally wouldn’t do but will with the proper signals. But it requires that people behave and follow directions so further mayhem doesn’t happen.
You’re blowing this WAY out of proportion… although to be fair I suspect Elon Musk made the first move in that direction.
^ This. A house fire in suburbia can generate a TFR, as an example. As can any local event that might draw news media in helicopters. There are TFR’s around power plants. Around certain other “facilities”. And so on.
^ This.
No FEMA person has said that.
Starlink? That is Musk running a scam. See, he says you can get one free month of Starlink. But you gotta buy a $400 Starlink reviver, and sign into aplan, where you pay $120 a month after that.
and Starlink wasnt prevented from reaching those in need
No, FEMA didn’t prevent Starlink equipment from reaching hurricane victims
Starlink offers satellite internet to areas without wired internet. Its founder Elon Musk falsely implied FEMA blocked its delivery to Hurricane Helene victims.
Basically you are believing Musk over several cites.
They weren’t. At all. That is a MAGA lie.
Could be this, taken to the extreme:
BTW: there were issues with volunteers not coordinating with TFR, not just the one which prompted this thread.
Buttigieg added that he wanted to explain how the FAA’s temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) work, given the “confusion and even misinformation” about them.
“This is a process that has been in place for decades, and basically what happens is, if you have a disaster area, there’s a lot of rescue operations going on. A local airport, or fire department, or the Coast Guard flying helicopters, somebody like that, can request what’s called a TFR. It doesn’t shut down the airspace, but it increases the level of coordination that goes on because you want to make sure that that airspace is safe and that you prevent the risk of collisions. And so when you hear that term, that’s what’s going on.”
Having Good Samaritans with pilots licenses pitch in is a “great thing,” he added, “it’s just important that they coordinate and make sure that it’s safe.”
Unless there is a TFR in place there is no restriction on where pilots can land. There’s no reason to restrict smaller airports from operating during an emergency situation. It would allow for more movement of targeted relief aid. This takes the load off of larger airports and allows distribution in places larger airplanes can’t land.
Take something like the Oshkosh Air show. Private planes are landing in closely spaced approaches on multiple flight levels. They designate a taxiway as an additional runway to accommodate a diverse approach of random aircraft. Standard plane spacing is waved in a coordinated procedure that has flight controllers working the flow from multiple ground locations.
I’m not suggesting that small aircraft are going to descend on major airports in an emergency. Flights will still flow based on available time slots. Cargo flights will replace passenger flights. But there’s a place for small aircraft and small airports. It’s not going to take anywhere near the coordination of Oshkosh to sort out flights in a disaster zone.
I know they aren’t. That’s why I phrased it as a hypothetical. There is a spectrum of possibilities from totally blocked to a complete free-for-all. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
My point was simply that Buttigieg has a broad spectrum of powers. He actually can snap his fingers and allow many things to happen. Though that does not include doing things with no warning whatsoever–he must take public safety into account.
It was one specific rule that was objectionable. I don’t know what Buttigieg did to resolve that, but it undoubtedly didn’t take more than a phone call to the right person. I am not at all complaining about the existence of rules. Simply stating that rules can go overboard and all parties should work toward a compromise when the rules become objectionable.
The people making wild claims about FEMA shutting everything down are not helping matters. But people claiming that there are no problems at all are little better.
Thousands of units were donated (along with generators). There’s no need to have a plan; Starlink has simply been enabled in the affected areas for the next month. No one is being forced into some monthly payments (though I’m sure many will do so!).
Your link takes a bizarre, strawman reading of the claims. No one ever said they were blocking every Starlink coming in or anything of that nature. But again, that very page says:
appears to have stemmed from isolated logistical issues individual pilots were having while delivering Starlink equipment.
“What was actually happening was the FAA was not closing down any airspace, but there was an issue with pilots who were helping to get Starlink equipment to where it needed to be. Having the right information, we worked that out with local authorities and we were able to take care of it,” Buttigieg said.
So… the pilots were not able to complete their deliveries. That sure sounds like they were blocked. Until Buttigieg called them up and resolved it somehow.
Am I living in some bizarro world where being told by the authorities that I can’t deliver something, that it doesn’t count as being blocked?
He did nothing, he didnt need to do anything, he just explained the law and regs… Musk is a MAGA liar. I posted a cite- his Starlink scam shipments were not blocked.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/elon-musk-hurricane-disinformation-trump-00182769
Elon Musk is using his social media network to spread election conspiracy theories about U.S. disasters — just as online falsehoods are complicating the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Musk has helped spread accusations that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “actively blocked” donations to victims of Helene and is “seizing goods … and locking them away to state they are their own” — allegations that FEMA officials call false and which run afoul of state and local Republican leaders’ praise for the assistance from Washington.
On his social network, X, Musk also amplified rumors that authorities in North Carolina had “taken control to stop people helping” stricken residents and accusations that sheriffs were threatening to arrest FEMA staff “if they hinder rescue and aid work.” Many of his allegations centered on the claim that immigrants had already depleted federal disaster funds, which FEMA has said is untrue.
A Transportation Department official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the exchange, suggested that Buttigieg did not intervene personally to clear the way for the flights. Rather, the official said that the chat was mostly walking Musk through how the flight restrictions and airport closures work and providing him with information for whom he could contact.
However, the billionaire failed to mention that victims of the disasters would need to purchase a Starlink starter kit for almost $400, The Register first reported.
Starlink’s website allows users in the affected hurricane zone to input their address, which then waives the service charge. However, the total cost, including the hardware, tax, shipping, and handling, still amounts to $396.68.
After 30 days, customers who qualify for free access will be automatically moved onto a $120-a-month subscription.“For those in areas affected by Hurricane Helene, Starlink is available and temporarily offering free service for the first month,” Starlink said.
“Please note: A Starlink kit is required to access this free service. If you do not already have a Starlink kit, you will need to purchase one,” it added.
After the SpaceEx founder spread misinformation about Hurricane Helene shutting down airspace, Buttigieg personally walked him through FAA regulations by phone.
See- Buttigieg didnt change anything, didnt cut any red tape, didnt specially allow any of the scam shipments in- he just explained to Musk how the laws and regulations work.
The Register pointed out that if anyone goes to sign up for the “free” service, there’re hit with a harsh reality: you have to pay for the equipment.
- But try to sign up for the ostensibly “free” service in an area Starlink has designated as a Helene disaster zone, and surprise: You still have to pay for the terminal (normally $350, but reportedly discounted to $299 for disaster relief, though that’s not reflected in Starlink’s signup page), plus shipping and tax, bringing the grand total to just shy of $400.,According to the Starlink Helene page, new customers who qualify for free access will be automatically moved to a paid $120-a-month residential subscription tied to the location the terminal was set up for after 30 days.*
So, there- proof- None of Musks shipments were being blocked. All Buttigieg did was explain things like you would to a spoiled child. Musk is spreading MAGA lies to help elect trump. And Musks “generosity” is actually a scam. Even if you do get the free month, and then cancel, you are still sitting on $400 of now worthless equipment.
If you genuinely can’t understand that some dishes were donated, while others were simply unlocked for the month, I can’t help you further.
I cant understand that, as it is not true. unless that number is insignificantly small. I gave cite after cite after cite - all of which say- you have to pay $400 for the dish and sign up for a plan.
I have not seen your cite.
and here is another-
Elon Musk’s Starlink charges Hurricane Helene survivors $400 for ‘free’ internet service…
You are accepting MAGA lies. Maybe a few units might have been given away, but all the info says it is gonna be $400.