If you’re worried you aren’t depressed or anxious enough, don’t be. Just turn on any episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and it’ll fix you right up. After all, nothing says “comedic entertainment” quite like learning you’re definitely going to die if you ever need dialysis. This week, Oliver turned his attention to something that’s been getting a lot of attention lately — air safety. More specifically, he focused on air traffic control and just how dire the current situation is. Spoiler alert: It isn’t good.
Like with most episodes of Last Week Tonight, there’s only so much ground they can cover in a limited amount of time, so if you’ve been following the situation closely, you may wish he had given more attention to certain issues. Still, the episode does a great job of emphasizing the main point that decades of failure to make meaningful progress on solving the problems air traffic controllers face have left us in a truly unsustainable situation. The good news is, the current administration is full of serious professionals who we can definitely trust to handle ATC reform with professionalism and focus.
Just kidding. We’re totally screwed. Actually fixing the problems with air traffic control requires thinking long-term and spending money, two things Republicans absolutely despise. Making grand promises and then blaming others when everything gets worse, though? They can totally handle that.
Life sucks for air traffic controllers
Like so many things that are currently wrong in the U.S., you can trace many of the problems air traffic control currently faces back to Ronald Reagan. After all, he’s the one who decided that firing all the air traffic controllers was better than meeting their demands for better pay and working conditions. Since then, attempts to modernize and improve air traffic control’s systems and hit the necessary staffing levels have been hampered by the fact that air safety costs money, and ATC’s budget is considered discretionary instead of mandatory, putting it at the mercy of Congressional budget negotiations.
For example, George W. Bush introduced plans for a next-generation air traffic control system that was supposed to be ready to go in 2025, but as Oliver points out, that certainly didn’t happen. Reforming ATC was always going to be a long and costly process, but it proved to be basically impossible, with budget hawks constantly looking to score political points with voters in the short term, while kicking the can down the road for others to deal with later. All the Republican-led government shutdowns certainly haven’t helped, either.
So now ATC is severely understaffed, the air traffic controllers we do have are forced to work long hours with inconsistent schedules, pay isn’t nearly good enough to deal with all the stress, the technology is beyond outdated, facilities are crumbling, and workers are burning out and the former reality TV star running the Department of Transportation has only made vague promises to fix things, while Trump’s big plan is to put Elon Musk in charge of fixing things. Wonderful.
