When an Army helicopter and a commuter jet collided over the Potomac last year, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft, a historic era of airline safety came to an end. American commercial airlines had gone without a fatal crash for 16 years, the longest disaster-free period ever for U.S. air travel.
In the nearly two years since, the strains on the system, which have been mounting for decades, have become acute. One of the best measures of aviation safety is the rate of “runway incursions,” close calls on the ground where planes come dangerously near each other. After a spike in 2023, those incidents fell sharply in 2024 as the F.A.A. and airlines tightened procedures. Since 2025 they have climbed again, and the most serious kind of incursion, where a collision is only narrowly avoided, is running even higher this year than last.
Air travel has been so safe in large part because of a profound commitment from the people in charge to learn from tragedies — what aviation experts call “lessons written in blood.” But the Trump administration has been slow to learn new lessons, and in some cases it seems to be unlearning the old ones.
“We are seeing the vulnerabilities in real time,” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., told me. “We have a duty to act before another tragedy occurs.”
How alarmed should we be? Over 30 years I’ve logged more than 2,000 hours as pilot-in-command of single-engine aircraft, and written three books on aviation. What I have seen since the Potomac crash is something new and worrying.
In a story for the magazine, I take readers through some of the system’s vulnerabilities:
Lessons from the Potomac crash have gone unlearned.
The morning after the Potomac crash, President Trump blamed the disaster on D.E.I. hiring practices during the Obama and Biden administrations. The National Transportation Safety Board found that the real culprit was overcrowding.
Aircraft at the most in-demand hubs were taking off and landing back to back, often using authorized shortcuts to speed up traffic flow. This was especially risky in the narrow air corridor between National Airport and restricted airspace over the White House and the Capitol, and the N.T.S.B. recommended 33 separate equipment and procedure changes that the F.A.A. should undertake to make future such accidents far less likely.
But the F.A.A. has not implemented one-third of these recommendations, a response the N.T.S.B. categorizes as “unacceptable.” (The F.A.A. told me that it is still evaluating how to address the remaining recommendations.)
The administration fired hundreds of safety personnel.
On Trump’s first day in office, his acting Homeland Security secretary fired all of the members of a key airline security advisory committee, as part of the department’s “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources.”
A month later, the F.A.A. fired some 400 probationary employees who had not yet won civil-service protection, including 132 members of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union.
“We’ll look back on choices like these as the first step in some future accident chain,” Bruce J. Holmes, a lifelong aviator and 30-year NASA veteran says of such changes.
Elon Musk installed SpaceX engineers at the F.A.A., raising concerns about conflicts of interest.
Elon Musk, when he was leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, promised to “make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”
He repeatedly derided Verizon, which had won a contract on that very project, and installed several SpaceX engineers at the F.A.A. as “special government employees” with ethical waivers to work on projects that might financially benefit Musk’s businesses.
In the end, SpaceX did not get a contract, but the F.A.A. did change a regulation that affected the company: Now more commercial flights are allowed to pass through areas where they face an accident caused by debris from a failed space launch.
The F.A.A. reached its hiring goals by cutting its target numbers.
In April, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a new effort to address a longstanding shortage of air traffic controllers: he would recruit video game enthusiasts. Gamers, he said, are used to looking at screens and talking when there’s a lot going on around them — “and that’s actually what you’re doing in a tower.”
A veteran controller was less sure. “This is real life and death,” he told me. “It actually is different from getting shot on a screen.”
In August, Duffy said the F.A.A. had “supercharged” the hiring process and reached its staffing target in record time. He didn’t mention that the F.A.A. had cut that target by more than 2,000, betting that new technology, including A.I., would make up the difference.
Unannounced maneuvers have caused chaos and confusion for aviation authorities.
The Pentagon has in repeated instances surprised commercial aviation authorities with unannounced maneuvers over the Caribbean, in one case forcing a JetBlue plane to take evasive action to avoid a collision
Without notifying anyone in the F.A.A., officials from Customs and Border Protection fired a laser-powered anti-drone weapon system, on loan from the Pentagon, in the area around El Paso, forcing the local airport to shut down completely. It ultimately emerged that the system had been deployed to shoot down a party balloon that C.B.P. had mistaken for a cartel drone.
The Trump administration has also deployed aircraft in displays that experts described as reckless, bending rules to allow administration officials to fly their own jets in restricted air space or, most recently, allowing the Qatari-donated 747 that has been serving as Air Force One to fly directly over the White House in airspace where no commercial airliner would ever be allowed, for what it called an “epic” photo op.
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