Or not
Plane narrowly misses business jet at Chicago’s Midway Airport
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their DOGE waste, fraud, and abuse cost-cutters are Making Airlines Great Again.
Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab on Monday slashed its first-quarter profit estimates by half, sending its shares down 14%, and its CEO said the environment had weakened due to U.S. economic uncertainty.
The Atlanta-based airline is the first major U.S. carrier to report that mounting economic worries among consumers and businesses are hurting domestic travel.
“We saw companies start to pull back. Corporate spending started to stall,” CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC. “Consumers in a discretionary business do not like uncertainty.”
Define uncertainty.
“The National Transportation Safety Board today recommended that helicopter traffic be banned from a four-mile stretch over the Potomac River when flights are landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport,” reports CNN:
Warning signs were missed: The warning signs leading up to the disaster over the Potomac River were there, NTSB investigators said, citing data detailing thousands of near collisions at the airport over a number of years. Investigators uncovered 15,214 “near miss events” between 2021 and 2024 where aircraft were within one nautical mile of colliding, with a vertical separation of less than 400 feet. Additionally, there were also 85 cases where two aircraft were separated by less than 1,500 feet, with a vertical separation of less than 200 feet, according to the NTSB.
On the east bank of the Potomac, Elon Musk’s unofficial junior G-men are slashing the nation’s air traffic controller workforce. But that’s not all (The Atlantic):
As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.
Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”
Between his rapid unscheduled disassembly of government agencies, his cosmik debris endangering air traffic, and consolidation of communications infrastructure under one man who can turn it off at the flick of a switch, Musk is a Bond-villain-level threat to national and world security as well as to air traveler safety.
The Atlantic article continues, “A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is ‘very safe’ or ‘somewhat safe,’ down from 71 percent last year.”
Emphasis mine:
Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.
“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”
Delta is not the only airline that will be reporting slashed profit projections this year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.6% since Trump’s second inauguration, with the S&P 500 index off 6.4% and the Nasdaq composite tumbling 11%. The small-cap Russell 2000 has slumped 11.3%.
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