The Department of Transportation might be forced to shut down the airspace in certain parts of the country if the government shutdown continues into next week.
Not to take any rightful criticism off of DOGE, but ATCs just have never properly recovered from Reagan getting pissy, and are still just not properly equipped.
This is a half truth. There are a lot of technologies from the 60’s to 80’s still in use as backups. At least for the enroute portion these are essentially backups for backups to ensure planes do not hit each other. Tech in towers is generally older overall since it’s much more costly to implement at every airport. Ultimately all this does is eat into the budget which could be used to hire more or pay better, but either likely go to other critical services anyway. Manpower is by far the biggest issue for controllers.
Not to take any rightful criticism off of DOGE, but ATCs just have never properly recovered from Reagan getting pissy, and are still just not properly equipped.
It turns out that it takes more than 3 decades to recover from a radical right presidential administration.
It sucks that we’re gonna have to do it again now
We also have tooling from the 60s if I’m remembering right. We could have spent money on airplanes not crashing at really any time.
This is a half truth. There are a lot of technologies from the 60’s to 80’s still in use as backups. At least for the enroute portion these are essentially backups for backups to ensure planes do not hit each other. Tech in towers is generally older overall since it’s much more costly to implement at every airport. Ultimately all this does is eat into the budget which could be used to hire more or pay better, but either likely go to other critical services anyway. Manpower is by far the biggest issue for controllers.