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Nervous air travelers might be forgiven for feeling a little more anxious than usual since the start of the Trump administration. Only nine days in, a horrific midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter ended a 16-year streak without a fatal U.S. airline crash. Then, two days later, a medevac jet nosedived into a busy Philadelphia street, killing all six aboard and one person on the ground. Then, a week later, a private jet slammed into a larger parked jet while landing in Arizona, killing the first plane’s pilot. And a week after that a Delta flight flipped upside down while landing in Toronto.
Was the Trump administration directly responsible for the surge in air disasters? The timing seems uncanny, but no. Whatever his flaws, Trump plainly does not deserve blame for this particular mess, which stems from a combination of bad luck and institutional failings that have been accumulating for years.
What is also plain, however, is that since it has come to power, the Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse. So is commercial aviation still remarkably safe? Yes. Is it about to get dramatically less safe? Also yes.
Here are some of the problems that already exist, and why they’ll get worse.
Failure to Regulate
A challenge in industrial safety is the tendency of powerful players to infiltrate and undermine their regulators. This dynamic has been playing out to dangerous effect in aviation, where Boeing has become such a dominant force that it’s been able to literally write its own rules. Starting in 2009, the Federal Aviation Administration launched a program under which it allowed Boeing to self-certify that its aircraft designs and production were safe.
It’s easy to see what that arrangement might have initially delighted Boeing’s C-suite, but it proved dangerous, both for Boeing’s customers and for the company itself. Two brand-new 737 Max airliners crashing in 2018 and 2019 annihilated public trust in Boeing, and the company has struggled to find its footing ever since.
Until now, at least, everyone agreed that regulations are important for aviation safety. The new administration doesn’t see things that way. Trump started his current term with a promise to dramatically slash regulations, proclaiming that “whenever an agency promulgates a new rule, regulation, or guidance, it must identify at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed.” By wiping out government regulations across the entire industry, the administration is asking aircraft-makers and operators to follow their own rules. Historically, that hasn’t worked out well.
Understaffing
The problem of understaffing at the FAA is one that has troubled experts for years. In 2023, the New York Times revealed that near misses between airliners have become endemic at airports across the country, “a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress,” with a leading cause being “mistakes by air traffic controllers stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage.”
Understaffing is not a problem that worries the Trump administration, however. As part of its project to massively slash the size of the government, it laid off some 400 FAA workers starting on Feb. 17. At the time, it said that none of the firings involved air traffic controllers. But five days later Musk posted to X that any federal employee that didn’t write an email explaining what they’d done during the previous week would be fired. If enforced, this diktat will likely ensnare some air traffic controllers from towers that can hardly afford to lose them.
But there’s a broader issue, which is that a great many FAA employees—not just air traffic controllers—positively affect aviation safety. Some of the FAA employees fired earlier this month, for instance, were charged with updating the navigational charts that help keep pilots clear of danger. If the prime motive of the Trump-Musk alliance is to gut the federal workforce as thoroughly as possible, that’s going to have all kind of deleterious effects, up to and including twisted smoldering wreckage.
Foreign Adversaries
Historically, the aviation industry has focused on preventing accidents by removing the risk of equipment malfunction and human error. Over the past decade, however, a whole new source of danger has emerged: foreign adversaries who attack civil aviation as part of a broad campaign of disruption against the democratic West. By far the worst actor in this space has been Russia and its proxies, which, since 2014, have shot down two airliners, pirated another, blown up a private jet, and waged internecine electronic warfare against airliners in northern Europe. Most ominously, last year Russian intelligence operatives began planting incendiary devices in air cargo shipments, a move that so alarmed the Biden administration that it warned the Kremlin that it was risking an all-out war.
To say that Trump is unlikely to push back against this particular threat is an understatement. It was, after all, Russian intelligence that helped him come to power in the first place, and during the beginning of his second term, the United States has quickly swung from adversary to overt ally of the Kremlin. At the same time, Trump has dismissed members of an advisory committee at the Transportation Security Administration that helped protect airlines and airports against foreign attack. Should an attack take place now, it would be hard to distinguish between foreign aggression and self-harm.
For the time being, America’s air transportation system still provides one of the safest forms of travel available. But that safety has taken great expense and patience to achieve. This carefully tuned system is now being actively dismantled by people who don’t understand how it works and don’t value what it does. Like a house whose beams have rotted from within, once air travel starts to fail, it will fail dramatically.
