There’s an ongoing meltdown at Newark airport. More than half of all US air travel cancellations are at Newark. There have been near-misses and regular outages. The fun is spreading, with a similar outage at Denver airport leading to a loss of communication between aircraft and controllers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is in no doubt as to the cause of these problems: former President Biden. The systems, equipment and infrastructure are old and should have been replaced years ago. This is not entirely wrong – US infrastructure has been rotting since the 1980s when Reagan decided it would be cheaper to stop doing any maintenance.
Nevertheless, it is notable that this has actually become a problem in the last three months. By coincidence, DOGE gleefully sacked a load of technicians, safety staff and ground support at about that time. Air traffic controllers were also threatened by email. That’ll help morale in a tricky situation. The latter incident was apparently caused by an “antiquated, old” email system. Duffy insists he doesn’t know who actually sent the email. Maybe try looking in the mirror. The computers didn’t send it themselves.
Duffy says it is perfectly safe to fly from Newark, but he did change his wife’s flight in order to avoid Newark. Better safe than sorry. Reassuring.
Needless to say, he’s another former Fox News presenter. It’s incompetence going all the way up. It won’t get better.