Duffy: Biden, Buttigieg ‘Did Nothing’ to Fix Failing Air Traffic Control System
“They literally spent time concerned about the word cockpit and changing cockpit to flight deck.”
Secretary of Transportation unloaded on former President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, over an air traffic control system report.
Absolutely insane. More evidence that Biden’s administration spent more time and money on “social justice” crap than actual work.
Duffy said outside the White House:
This is not a new problem. We’ve known this problem has existed. There has been multiple GAO reports over the last four years saying you have real problems with air traffic control and you should do something with it before it actually fails.
So think about this. The last administration spent $1.2 trillion, the largest infrastructure package ever known to man, they spent, Joe Biden signed right here at this White House, and how much was spent to rebuild air traffic control? $5 billion. And of the $5 billion that was spent or was given, only $1 billion was actually spent. So they have made no investments in the system that we now see having issues in Newark.
On top of that, they were focused on things like racist roads. They literally spent time concerned about the word cockpit and changing cockpit to flight deck, it’s not funny. That’s actually what they spent time on, or airmen to aeronaut, and so now this administration has come in, and it was shortly after the DCA air crash that I started to look at veer traffic control system. And very quickly I saw one piece of the pie where there was issues and then scratched further. And there’s another piece of the pie. And as we looked at it, we see that the whole system needs to be redone. We need to build a brand new air traffic control system.
A government watchdog warned Biden & Buttigieg about the failing air traffic control system. Look at this report.
They knew the air traffic control system was strained AND STILL DID NOTHING!
Working with @POTUS, we are going to do what no administration has done: deliver an… pic.twitter.com/R8TiMHSuwA
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 6, 2025
More than 100 systems declared questionable at best were found to have “critical operational impacts on the safety and efficiency of the national airspace.” pic.twitter.com/la3SdaQ3CO
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 6, 2025
Another report from a government watchdog in 2023 warned staffing shortages for air traffic controllers jeopardized flight safety. https://t.co/g6E5SWGV1s pic.twitter.com/TFOevOYC0u
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 6, 2025
Here’s everything @FAANews & @USDOT are doing to address to the situation at Newark: https://t.co/VqkO7fqWfe pic.twitter.com/bjRBwdtOrU
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 7, 2025
Newark Airport
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been railing about a fiasco at Newark’s airport, which has caused delays and disruptions.
Schumer demanded an FAA investigation, describing the agency as “a mess.”
Schumer even admitted that air traffic controllers had warned the FAA for a long time about the problems.
Interesting. Duffy dropped some truth bombs on CNN yesterday about Schumer and the fact that DOGE hasn’t done anything critical to the department that would delay or cause problems to fix any major problem:
We’ve been bringing on and hiring more air traffic controllers, bringing more air traffic controllers into the school. DOGE has had no role in cutting our critical safety mission at DOT. We’ve expanded that, whether they’re pipeline inspectors or rail inspectors, airline inspectors or air traffic controllers.
But what Chuck Schumer is talking about is DOGE which again, has no play. But if you want the idea to come in and look at what happened in TRACON when it moved from New York. They moved it last summer under Pete Buttigiege from New York to Philly. And when they do that investigation, they’ll find that Chuck Schumer was actually part of the problem where they were testing up new equipment to deploy in Philly.
And because he kept playing political games, that equipment wasn’t tested. You’ll also find that before they moved the TRACON to Philly from New York for Newark that they actually should have built out the infrastructure around Philly so you don’t have to pull that information out of Newark. They didn’t do those things correctly and part of the problem was Chuck Schumer so I look forward to the IG investigation about what the real problems were that we’re experiencing right now, how it goes back to the games that Chuck Schumer was playing as he was a lead senator from New York.
.@SenSchumer played political games at the expense of our air traffic control system getting patched. Now he wants to play more politics as we try to fix the problem once and for all. Look forward to your support for our plan, Chuck! pic.twitter.com/a3ZwYY2CsD
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 6, 2025
Background on Newark/Long Island Airspace
TRACON stands for “terminal radar approach control.” I cannot believe I had to find this information on Reddit. Someone asked about the move to Philly, and an air traffic controller answered.
The TRACON on Long Island (N90) worked the EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport) airspace with 33 certified controllers. The FAA transferred the airspace to Philadelphia and sent only 24 certified controllers. The guy wrote:
So now there are only 24 certified controllers in the EWR area at PHL.
Additional issues come from separation of EWR and LGA airspace that don’t have a significant affect on beautiful days. But they have a huge impact during storms.
Where i [sic] might have squeezed some guys though a hole in weather that was in EWR airspace (or vice versa), now that hole is unusable because I don’t feel confident I can coordinate this complex operation via telephone. I used to just send a supervisor or controller over to the EWR area to talk in person about how to share airspace. Now I have to be conservative and hold first. Then once I feel like we are on the same page, I can run traffic.
This Reddit thread started eight months ago. Eight months ago. Another person wrote, “expect it to get much, much, much worse in 2026.”
Another person wrote:
A safety review was conducted prior to the airspace cutover from N90 to PHL. This review revealed numerous safety risks that would be introduced into the operation as a result of this move. The Agency chose to accept these safety risks and move the airspace anyways.
The Agency has reduced the staffing of the EWR Area by ~30%. They have uprooted Air Traffic Controllers from their homes/lives and forced them to PHL. They are willingly accepting safety risks as a result of this move. All to “fix a staffing problem”. Check your napkin math from above.
Yes, Schumer. Let’s have an investigation. Let’s find out why Newark is having so many problems.
I’d love to find out more information about that safety review. I’d also love to find more about Schumer’s involvement.
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If you have aberrant ideas of what to do with your male reproductive parts behind closed doors perhaps you shouldn’t be in charge of what to call the part of the airplane where the pilots sit.
Both men are revolting in the extreme.
Sean Duffy is the Man, dont know what you are talking about
Pretty sure he was talking about Dementia Joe and Mayor Pete
“They literally spent time concerned about the word cockpit and changing cockpit to flight deck.”
But look how handsomely they rearranged the flight deck chairs before the flight crashed.
Think I’ll stroll down to my local interstate cloverleaf for a couple hours to trade “yo mama” jokes with my favorite racist underpass.
oh come on
we all know that the obama era affrimaction dei hires told the rest…
dont bother to go to school and spend money to be atc
cause we are going to hire based on race
couple that in with never trumpers and old out dated equipment so that the left can either through their polices ( look like heros) or
blame the gop who want to be fiscal conservative ( now they look bad ) for not spending money to fix the equipment
start fixing it up b/c the welfare state runs the business
thats right
if the airlines ran it
then the government could enforce any laws if laxness on the airlines causes troubles
A guy who puts cheese on a raw hamburger should not be anywhere near air traffic control.
It sounds like the man seriously has some work cut out for him. Not surprised, the adults are finally back in charge.
wonder if they are going to turn over the atc ( or maybe just dc airspace) to the military?
hope not but thats what I think
Perennial and predictable incompetence, ineptitude, criminal negligence and dereliction of duty — that sums up the vile Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks for you, in a nutshell.
I’d say it sums up the government in general.
A reminder: FAA ‘reform’ has been in the news 30+ years. I remember reading these stories in the 90s. Air traffic control has been needing ‘reform’ forever. And it never happens.
I recall from memory one great one: FAA was going through a ‘reform’ — they had picked a vendor, put through a set of specs on equipment, etc., and scrapped it at the last minute. Why? Because one FAA administrator didn’t like that the ATC operators were going to use green-screen CRTs; the administrator wanted them to use orange-screen CRTs. And he killed the whole thing over that. That is your FAA.
I too remember this as a problem for a long long time now. Some of the systems are 50 years old. Others are 20-30 years old. Antiquated technology.
I worked for Federal Systems Sales of the second largest computer manufacturer in the world in the mid-70s. I was on the military side, but civil agencies sales shared the same building. The salesman assigned to the FAA was unique in being a revenue center who had no installation personnel overhead.
As if flying wasn’t nerve racking already
I heard on FNC this morning that no less than 40 ATC took ‘mental health’ break after the recent incident at Newark Airport. Lawrence Jones correctly highlighted the insanity of that, pointing out that 1st responders who routinely see grotesque crimes scenes don’t take these kind of paid breaks.
No, and are lucky to get 10 minutes to pull it all together again
I read that 20% of the air traffic controllers walked off the job after the blackout and that’s what caused the huge fustercluck at Newark Liberty Airport. There’s some insane federal law (?) work that says they can take time off with pay if they experience a “traumatic event” at their workplace.
This issue is way more complex than it seems, no matter how complex it seems to you now. This is a big part of the problem: the intellectual complexity of a good solution is very high, way higher than the politicians that are briefly in charge.
The system was already in crisis when I started looking at it in 1989. The hardware running ATC was obsolescent, but there was new stuff brewing. The SGI hardware started as plug-in boards for a VAX, but then went to stand-alone M68K computers. It has the geometry engine, which could quickly do all the calculations needed to do 3-space ATC work. Then MIPS came out with the M2000 RISC system, which was a general purpose solution that integrated with the SGI geometry engine.
FAA said “We will take it!”. 35 years later, the work is still not complete.
My graduate advisor went on to design follow-up hardware at MIPS. A co-worker got his commercial pilots license and went to the FAA.
There was no understanding at the FAA of the gigantic industrial complexity of specifying three different chip systems to be used for half a century. (Say Intel X86, MIPS2000, DEC Alpha.) When these commercial systems were not supported, they died or transformed. Hardware and operating systems have changed dramatically in the past 30+ years, so the original assumptions for systems specification are invalid. Most of the smart people retired or died.
ATC is infrastructure with a 5-decade time horizon. The people in charge, and lots of the intermediate management, cannot think on this timeline and have a hard time thinking past 90 days. So you get decades of excuses and hundreds of billions in wasted effort.
The same scenario has played out many times in many different domains (in govt and the private sector). People always underestimate the complexity of replacing legacy systems with new technology. Probably the only way to do it will be to completely re-think the way the ATC system works, and to build a new system around that operating model. And then migrate the traffic onto the new model/system.
Twenty years ago a friend, who was retired ATC, was retained by the FAA to assist in upgrades to the system – twenty years later and the government hasn’t fixed it. Question – how much has been spent and what was accomplished. Government is very good as spending hardworking taxpayer money, and also quite good at accomplishing very little.
Well, in his defense, Pete was very busy nursing his new baby, so he didn’t have time to be bothered with this whole ‘air traffic thingy’.
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