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.
And I had been thinking this would be a category excluded from the government’s efforts to cut government jobs. Some of us are just too naive.
What do you need controllers for?
Make the pilots look for other traffic. /s
President Musk is treating this exactly the same way he did the Twitter buyout. Because social media users being temporarily inconvenienced by their platform’s lack of staff is exactly the same as fucking up government functions that people’s lives depend on.
Be thankful he’s not replacing the radios with “X”.
You can’t have human error if you don’t have humans.
Why not take a page from Ronnie Reagan’s playbook?
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (ph), PATCO, was protesting what they considered to be unfair wages and long work hours. They walked off the job. And two days later, on this day 40 years ago, Reagan fired more than 11,000 of those who hadn’t crossed the picket line. And that dealt a serious blow to the American labor movement.
How about if everyone just quit flying for frivolous reasons?
10’s of thousands of flights for no particular reason, every hour. Look at flightradar25. Do you really need to live in Montana and fly to visit Grandma in Kentucky? No.
You sit in traffic behind a diesel truck appalled by the exhaust smell and think something should be done about it. Yet jets using a slightly refined same fuel are flying everywhere, all of the time. Millions of tons of fuel each hour. Out of sight and out of mind. Climate Change can never be taken seriously as long as this continues.
What is remarkable is that so many flights go off without a problem. Not a Trump issue.
What may seem frivolous is important to others. And leisure trips support a vast industry of theme parks ski resorts and the like.
It’s now been widely publicized that at the time of the accident at DCA, there was only one air traffic controller doing the work of what normally would be done by two. If that controller takes the buyout offer from co-president Musk, the work of two controllers will be done by none at all.
What could possibly go wrong?
As long as the nonexistent controller is a straight, White, man . . . nothing.
Define “frivolous”. I don’t drive, so if I want to go from Central NC to Chicago, which I do several times a year, my only option is to fly. If there was a direct train I could take I might consider that, but there isn’t. (I looked it up once, and IIRC the only option was to take a train to NY and change for another train to Chicago.
I don’t think any of you guys appreciate Trump’s expertise in the field of Aviation. If I may quote:
We had a situation where, you had a helicopter that had the ability to stop.
I have helicopters. You can stop a helicopter very quiclky.
It had the ability to go up or down. It had the ability to turn, and the turn it made was not the correct turn obviously.
Um and uh it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told - we don’t know that would have been the difference because the timings was so tight it was so it was so little there was so little time to think.
But what you did have is you had vision um the helicopter had vision of the plane because you had vision of it all the way perfect vision all the way from at Kennedy Centre where the tape was taken and for some reason there weren’t adjustments made again you could have slowed
down the helicopter substantially, you could have stopped the helicopter you could have gone up you could have gone down you could have gone straight up, straight down, you could have turned you could have done a million different maneuvers.
For some reason it just kept going and then made a slight turn at the very end and it was by that time it was too late.
Uh, they shouldn’t have been at the same height, because if it wasn’t at the same height you could have gone under it or over it and nobody realized or they didn’t say that it’s at the same height. At the same height it would it still wouldn’t have been great, but you would have missed it by quite a bit.
Could have been 1000 feet higher it could have been 200 feet lower, but it was exactly at the same height and somebody should have been able to point that out.
So all of this is going to be studied, but it just seems to me from a couple of words that I like to use the words Common Sense, uh, some really bad things happened and some things happened that shouldn’t have happened so you had a helicopter going in identical direction.
You had a helicopter that was at the exact same height as somebody going in essentially the opposite direction. You had a plane following a track which is a track that every other plane followed and I I don’t imagine I know I’ve heard today that they might have been following the preceding plane which was pretty close, but not that close, uh the preceding plane but you wouldn’t have even been able to see that because of the direction that the helicopter was coming in at so you had a uh confluence of of bad decisions that were made and you have people that lost their lives.
I don’t think anyone else on this board can really criticise him in any valid sense, unless they also understand that helicopters can go up, down, straight up and straight down, and that they can turn, and stop, and that, if the plane and the helicopter were not at the same height, they would not have collided, and some really bad things happened that shouldn’t have happened.
Understaffed tower. Now Trump has two bona-fide scapegoats: Old Joe understaffing ATC (or all those handicapped DEI hires called in sick that day) and what he will call a DEI female pilot with probably far more hours than his (private helicopter) pilots. Luckily for him he gets to fly in Marine One.
It is worth remembering that whatever he says, doesn’t have to bear any semblance to reality. It really doesn’t matter what the facts are; he will just make shit up, or quote other people who are making shit up. He can blame whatever takes his fancy, and his followers will lap it up.
Uh, they shouldn’t have been at the same height, because if it wasn’t at the same height you could have gone under it or over it
The man is a freaking genius! (And has even said so himself.)
I don’t know if you’ve actually watched that trainwreck of a public address. It was like watching a 4 year old trying to recite the words to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, except where the a 4-year-old is distracted by also having shat his pants the moment he stepped on stage.
I didn’t see it, and have no wish to, though I appreciate those who suffered through it giving us their impression. I’m trying to minimize my exposure to Trump for fear it may cause an excessive loss of brain cells.
Pauli got the Nobel prize for saying much the same thing about fermions. Trump should get a gold star at least!
I could only stand to read a small part of what you quoted. someone needs a tranquilizer dart FFS, as well as being given fake buttons to push, nuclear related or otherwise. Maybe a fake phone so he only thinks he is tweeting, or whatever it’s called now. 
Xouble xlus xood xpeak.