American Aviation Is Near Collapse

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The American commercial-aviation system is a modern marvel. On any day of the week, a passenger can get to and from nearly any two cities of decent size and to destinations on five other continents, for a relatively affordable price and with exceptional safety. Or at least all of that was true until recently. Today, the system seems near collapse.

Travelers around the country are facing long security lines: two to three hours at New York airports, three in Atlanta, two in Houston. Checkpoints are staffed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine’s Day because of a partial government shutdown.

Meanwhile, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, one of the nation’s busiest, all flights are paused after an Air Canada jet collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of other people. A closure at LaGuardia puts pressure on other airports in the area, such as Newark Liberty, which has seen its own share of near-misses and technical failures recently.

Each of these situations had its own specific causes, but what unites them is years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction. Modern air travel was a classic postwar American triumph, but the system was quietly eroding from within. The federal government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades, resulting in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted the use of "floppy disks and copper wires" in critical infrastructure.

Furthermore, the FAA has seen "regulatory capture," where cozy relationships with manufacturers like Boeing allowed safety issues to go unnoticed. Political gridlock has also snarled the passenger experience, with the TSA unable to pay agents due to the shutdown. The administration's response, including deploying ICE agents to airports, is a prime example of "kludgeocracy"—reaching for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.