The bright yellow livery of Spirit Airlines may soon disappear from the skies. The country’s seventh-largest airline has been in financial trouble for years: It hasn’t turned a profit since 2019 and filed for bankruptcy twice in the last two years. Despite all that, its leaders predicted that the airline could exit bankruptcy and return to profitability as early as 2027. It just needed time and a little stability to do so.

That time may have run out. On Monday, April 20th, Spirit approached the government to ask for a federal bailout. The sudden rise in fuel prices caused by the war in Iran will add an estimated $360 million in unexpected costs to its balance sheet this year. Spirit’s executives appear to believe that the airline may run out of cash soon unless it gets outside help.

In public, the Trump administration appears skeptical that a bailout is the right solution. In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy questioned whether a bailout would simply “put good money after bad” and “forestall the inevitable.” Trump himself also appeared to favor a merger rather than a bailout. “I don’t mind mergers. I’d love somebody to buy Spirit,” he said on Tuesday’s episode of Squawk Box. “It’s 14,000 jobs.”

Behind closed doors, however, their strategy is very different. On Wednesday morning The Wall Street Journal reported that the government was proposing a $500 million loan to Spirit in exchange for a “potential significant stake” in the airline. 

Senators from both parties criticized the proposal. “The government doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) posted on X. “This is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea.”

“What do the American people get out of this taxpayer bailout?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “Will the failed airline executives be held accountable?” Warren has a point. The fuel crisis is affecting the whole airline industry. Why is Spirit the only airline that has been pushed to the brink?

The answer is a mix of bad economics, bad strategy, and plain bad luck. As an ultra-low-cost carrier (ULCC), Spirit can’t take the approach of other airlines such as United and Delta that are raising fares and adding fees. Delta alone projects $2 billion in additional fuel expenses this year that it has to offset by increasing its prices across the board. 

Spirit’s business model targets price-sensitive flyers who care only about the lowest possible fare. Its prices are routinely 40 percent lower than those of legacy airlines. Raising them might earn a little bit of extra money per seat, but it would certainly price out the more than 100 million passengers who fly ULCCs every year just for the low costs. 

This was a profitable strategy for much of the airline’s history. 

“For families in particular, it made a lot of sense to try to find something that was super inexpensive,” said Mike Barger, one of JetBlue’s original cofounders, who now teaches business at the University of Michigan. “The business model wasn’t a bad idea back in the late ’90s, early 2000s.” 

In late 2019, Spirit bet that the value-seeking end of the market would keep growing. So it aggressively expanded to better compete with legacy airlines. It took on $4 billion in debt to lease 70 new airplanes and add 43 new destinations to its network. 

Then came covid. The aviation industry collapsed in 2020, months after Spirit was locked into its multibillion-dollar lease agreements. It took four years for domestic travel to return to pre-pandemic levels. When it did, the recovery was asymmetric. Cost-conscious travelers simply didn’t fly like they used to, which hammered Spirit particularly hard. 

By the end of 2025, Spirit airplanes were flying at only 75 percent capacity — far too little to sustain its low-price, high-volume business model. It entered a death spiral of issuing more debt to cover its operating costs, which grew as more airplanes came online, which required Spirit to issue more debt.

Then the engines on many of its new airplanes stopped working. Like many low-cost carriers, Spirit relies on a simplified fleet design for easy maintenance. Its Airbus A320neos all use the Pratt & Whitney PW1100G jet engine. In 2023, however, Pratt & Whitney announced a recall of 3,000-plus PW1100G engines due to a dangerous manufacturing defect. Overnight, nearly 20 percent of Spirit’s entire fleet was grounded. Many of those airplanes still have yet to return to service.

So when jet fuel prices soared from $2.18 a gallon in January to nearly double that as of this writing, it added unsustainable costs to the airline’s shaky finances. On a typical day, Spirit’s fleet requires more than 1 million gallons of fuel to operate. The airline, which had only $705 million cash on hand as of February, literally cannot afford gas. 

Spirit has been trying to find solutions to its deteriorating finances for several years. It attempted a merger with JetBlue in 2022. This was blocked on antitrust grounds in 2024, even though the combined company would only have a 9 percent market share and had a largely complementary route structure. In January 2025, Frontier offered to buy Spirit outright. That offer was rejected by Spirit shareholders. 

“The argument JetBlue was making is that, ‘Look, do we want Spirit to go away or do you want to at least give us collectively a chance to fight it out to keep fares low?’” said Berger. “Doubling your size and adding all those assets and people does put you in a better position to compete.”As a last resort Spirit entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 — the first major airline in a decade to do so. Under the terms of its restructuring it has cut capacity, exited more than 200 unprofitable routes, furloughed employees, and canceled some of its airplane leases. 

This has taken almost $5.4 billion of debt off its books since last year. But the airline still isn’t profitable. In 2025 it posted a $2.7 billion annual loss. 

The Bloomberg article and subsequent coverage prompted Spirit’s management to email all of its employees last Friday. 

“Like many of you, we have seen recent media coverage speculating about Spirit’s future,” they wrote. “We have heard these rumors before. Like then, we shouldn’t allow speculation, especially from unnamed sources, to distract us from delivering for our Guests and each other.”

They did not explicitly deny the rumor that the airline was on the brink of insolvency, however. (Spirit Airlines did not respond to a request for further comment.) If Spirit disappears, domestic aviation will shrink by 5 percent almost overnight. Millions of people may lose affordable access to the sky. 

“Spirit has a place in the market,” said Barger. “It has an effect on prices for the routes they fly. Their customers won’t jump over to an American or a Delta.” 

And even those who prefer legacy carriers might find their wallets a little lighter in its absence of Spirit. A 2013 MIT study found that whenever Spirit entered a new market, fares in that market decreased by an average of $20 per segment. 

So make fun of Spirit Airlines all you want — we’ve all done it at some point — but don’t be too quick to cheer its demise. You’re going to miss it when it’s gone. 

KC Guidry usually gets to the airport two hours before a flight to give herself enough time to get through security. But she knew her flight on the morning of Monday, March 23, out of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport was going to be anything but routine.

“I heard the lines were long through TikTok and through the news,” she said. “The day before, I saw the wait time for the terminal I needed to leave from was 200 minutes. I saw they were not doing PreCheck or CLEAR, so I adjusted my schedule.”

She arrived at the airport at 12:30AM for a 7:20AM flight and joined a security line that was already looping around Houston’s Terminal E. She didn’t get through until 4:30AM. Others likely fared worse. By 9:30AM, the airport was already warning travelers that wait times could approach four hours. By the end of the day, they were averaging closer to five — and some security lines stretched all the way out of the terminal and into the underground parking garage.

Airport chaos has become the hallmark of the Trump era. Travelers already have to deal with skyrocketing oil prices, a crumbling safety system, and the war in Iran. And for the third time in six months, funding for the TSA has lapsed due to a budget impasse. Nearly 50,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) who man the nation’s airport security checkpoints haven’t received a paycheck since late February. 

As “essential workers,” TSOs are required by law to show up for work even if they’re not getting paid. But not all of them do. Although it’s illegal for TSA employees to organize an official strike, thousands are independently calling out sick. Two weeks ago, nearly 6 percent of them didn’t report to work — three times higher than normal. This week it’s closer to 10 percent nationwide. And call-out rates exceeded 33 percent at several of the country’s largest airports, including JFK in New York, Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental. 

Despite the chaos, the Trump administration appears in no hurry to end the budget stalemate, even though a recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed broad disapproval of the shutdown in general, and the way Republicans were handling it. For weeks, President Trump himself has tied any deal to restore TSA funding to the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which Democrats are prepared to filibuster. He even rejected a compromise negotiated by members of his own party that would have reopened the department on Monday.

Instead, he ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the nation’s airports to “help our wonderful TSA Agents.” This appeared to surprise Cabinet officials, who offered vague, contradictory explanations on ICE’s new role. On Monday, ICE agents could be spotted at airports doing little more than standing around, looking tough, and occasionally helping people lift their bags into scanners.

(ICE did not respond to our request for more details about their deployment).

Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, his position on the shutdown makes little sense on its face. But the strategy becomes clear when examined through the lens of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for the complete dismantling of the TSA. 

“The Transportation Security Administration [should] be privatized,” the document says. “Until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider, and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.”

Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem did accomplish the last of these goals, stripping TSA workers of many of their collective bargaining rights last December. But she spent the rest of her tenure glorying in her department’s power. She personally attended ICE raids in New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in full hair and makeup. She used Coast Guard funds to purchase two private jets and authorized the TSA’s purchase of $1 billion in new security equipment. She even spent $220 million on an ad campaign starring herself that was apparently meant to scold undocumented migrants back across the border. This was not the behavior of someone ready to give DHS’s responsibilities — and its considerable budget — to the private sector. 

Her successor Markwayne Mullin, who was confirmed on March 24, doesn’t seem to share Noem’s proclivity for the spotlight. 

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said at his confirmation hearing. 

He didn’t otherwise mention how he might run the TSA except to generally advocate for better funding for the whole department. But we do know he is a consistent supporter of the Heritage Foundation. During his final term in Congress, he voted in line with the think tank’s positions 90 percent of the time. 

Supporters of TSA privatization clearly sense an opportunity with Mullin in charge. Since his nomination was announced, Fox News, Reason magazine, and the right-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute have published articles laying out the case for TSA privatization. Over the weekend, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) promised to revive his “Abolish TSA Act,” which died in committee last year. 

Mullin may never have a better opportunity to do so than he does now, with Trump seemingly willing to endure voter anger and public bafflement to advance his agenda. TSA workers are quitting at a rate of nearly 200 per week. And a public that has endured airport meltdowns during two of the busiest travel periods of all time — Thanksgiving 2025 and Spring Break 2026 — might be willing to accept radical change if it means getting through security in a reasonable amount of time.

Privatization might look something like the arrangement at Kansas City International or Orlando Sanford. At these airports, employees of a third-party security company called VMD Corp staff the checkpoints but still follow TSA procedures. They have been unaffected by the government shutdown: “The professional teams at our SPP airports have less than 3 minute lines,” the company taunted on X over the weekend. 

Or it could look like the mess at Canada’s Calgary International. In 2024, a company named Paladin International took over screening duties. Since then, security screeners have complained about consistent understaffing, poor working conditions, and even being denied bathroom breaks and access to water. Wait times at Calgary routinely exceed 30 minutes, far higher than the national average for Canada.

Privatization is no magic bullet. But the status quo is untenable as well. For as long as the TSA remains useful as political leverage, travelers should prepare for periodic disruptions with unbearably long wait times. And if President Trump continues to complain that “our airports are like from a third world country,” as he did during a 2016 debate, he needs to look no farther than his own administration for someone to blame. 

It was a little after 1PM on Friday, February 28th, and Samantha Lujano was about to board her flight from Dubai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the drone attacks began. 

She had already received her boarding pass and gone through customs. Her flight was at the gate and her bags were loaded. She was simply waiting for the gate agents to open the flight for boarding. So she opened TikTok and started scrolling. 

But instead of relieving her boredom, the algorithm fed her anxiety. It showed her dozens of videos of explosions that purported to be from around the Persian Gulf — including a few in Dubai itself. She knew better than to believe everything she saw on social media, and had heard nothing from official sources yet. For now, she kept calm.

Then her friends back home started texting her: “Did you see what happened? They just closed the airspace.”

She told them not to worry. After all, she was on the ground in Dubai and nothing seemed to be wrong. Then, in an instant, every single flight status on the airport’s departures monitor changed to blinking red. 

“Canceled, canceled, canceled,” she recalled. “Everything was canceled.”

Dubai and the whole region had become a war zone. In response to a joint US and Israeli strike that morning, Iran had launched missiles and drones at targets across the Middle East, including Dubai. Most were intercepted by local defense systems. Even so, debris from intercepted drones caused damage across Dubai and injured four people. 

By early afternoon, civilian airspace over the entire region was closed and more than 3,400 flights were canceled. 

Lujano and many of her fellow passengers were now stuck. They no longer had valid visas to return to the UAE. They had no accommodations lined up. They had no choice but to wait in the departures area until someone in authority came up with a solution. And all the while, missiles and drones rained down overhead.

“We were really stranded,” she said.

Few places rely on air travel as much as the countries of the Persian Gulf. The 700 miles of coastline between Kuwait and Dubai contain seven major international airports that together receive more than 220 million passengers a year. The vast majority are international travelers, carried here by state-owned airlines including Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways.

This was no accident, according to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute and codirector of the Middle East Energy Roundtable. Beginning in the early 2000s, Gulf Coast countries invested billions into expanding airport capacity and growing their airline networks.

“They relied on infrastructure and technological advances to become these critical nodes on the 21st-century aviation map,” he told The Verge. “They saw that you could now connect any two points in the world with a stop in the Gulf, with the rise of these ultra-long-haul aircraft.”

The Gulf had two more advantages as a central aviation hub. One was geographical: It was already located less than an eight-hour flight from 80 percent of the world’s population. The other was environmental: Gulf airport developers did not have to deal with environmental regulations like their American and European counterparts did. (London Heathrow, for example, has been attempting to add a third runway since 2009; it only got approval to expand in November 2025.)

Since then, Gulf airports have steadily taken share away from the rest of the world’s airport hubs. The tipping point came in 2015, when Dubai overtook London Heathrow as the world’s busiest airport for international travelers. A coalition of American, Canadian, and European airlines all warned that they were rapidly losing ground to their Gulf Coast competitors. 

The rest of the world’s loss was the Gulf’s gain, especially in the UAE. Forty years ago, it was an oil-dependent petrostate. Today, its aviation industry contributes more to its GDP than oil. With more travel comes more economic diversification, including many of the flashier industries now associated with the country: real estate, diamonds, cryptocurrency, and, most of all, social media. 

Others in the region are attempting to follow the UAE’s lead. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Iraq have committed more than $150 billion to build six new international airports that will rival Dubai’s airport in size. According to Airports Council International, the Middle East will become the world’s fastest-growing aviation region this year, surpassing Latin America and Africa.

But growth depends on one thing: peaceful skies. That held for the past 20 years thanks in part to a significant American military presence in the region, and an unofficial agreement to spare civilian targets in case of an actual conflict. 

But that agreement ended on Friday, February 28th, when America and Israel attacked, and Iranian leaders instituted their “mosaic strategy” of retaliation. For the first time, Iran launched attacks at economic as well as military targets, including airports.

To date, the attacks have disrupted almost 20,000 total flights that have stranded nearly a million people. Every strike that was captured on video and every expat who posted a reaction on social media caused a different kind of damage to Dubai and its neighbors. They permanently shattered the region’s image as the only place to go if you wanted to feel untouchable. 

Natalia Izak and Tomasz Brozio, both from Poland, had come to Qatar to experience that feeling. They were sunbathing on Doha’s West Bay Beach when the government broadcast its first emergency alert.

“Every single phone at the beach started ringing,” Izak recalled. “Then we got a second alert and a third one.”

“After the third one there was an explosion,” said Brozio.

They took an Uber back to their hotel and exchanged contact information with their driver just in case.

After three frustrating hours on hold with Qatar Airways and a trip to the customer service desk at the airport, they received a voucher to extend their hotel stay. But no one knew when they would be able to leave. 

“We didn’t want to stay in this situation,” said Izak. “We wanted to get out on our own.”

After two days they called their Uber driver. He said that in the morning he could get them to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where at least some international flights were still operating. He would arrange their visas, drive them to the border, and have his cousin take them the rest of the way to Riyadh. 

They successfully crossed the border and arrived in Riyadh just before midnight, well in advance of their scheduled flight back to Poland at 6AM the next day. But another wave of attacks closed Riyadh’s airspace temporarily. 

After a 12-hour wait, they were able to leave — almost three days after their original departure date. Despite their ordeal, they’d consider traveling to the Middle East again. But they would prefer to wait until the threat of war recedes.

“To be honest we would like to come back,” said Brozio. “We really enjoyed Qatar.” 

Not everyone has been so lucky. As of this writing, Samantha Lujano is still in Dubai after eight days. Still, she says she has little to complain about. Within hours of her flight’s cancellation, the government’s Tourism Office issued her an emergency visa and gave her a free hotel room for as long as she needed it. 

“I feel grateful to be in this situation in Dubai,” she said. “It’s the safest place to be.”

Dubai’s airport is running at about half capacity now, although other airports remain functionally closed. The day before the conflict started, Qatar Airways operated 583 flights out of Doha. Today, it plans to operate just 16. 

The disruption is already eating into the Gulf’s image as an international playground. High-end sushi restaurants have stopped receiving shipments of Japanese fish. Formula 1 may postpone two upcoming races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, since teams cannot fly their equipment to the race sites. And hotels are largely empty, with average occupancy rates dropping as low as 20 percent.

No one knows whether the war will conclude tomorrow or in a month. But it is clear that one of the busiest air corridors in the world will remain effectively closed until it does.  

The longest government shutdown in the nation’s history may soon be over. Once it is, federal museums and monuments will reopen. SNAP payments will start flowing again. And tens of thousands of essential federal employees, including air traffic controllers, will get paid for the first time since October. 

But air travel won’t go back to normal anytime soon.

Airport disruptions have been the most visible effect of the government shutdown since it began on October 1st. Since then, a growing proportion of air traffic controllers have taken time off rather than work at a job that doesn’t pay. Staffing levels were already critical at many facilities before the shutdown. The added burden of unscheduled callouts has caused an immediate increase in flight disruptions.

In mid-October, when we first started tracking the effects of the shutdown on air traffic, about one in 10 flights were delayed or canceled — double the disruption rate from the same time last year. But now every air traffic controller in the country hasn’t been paid in at least six weeks. Staffing shortages have impacted operations at half of the nation’s “Core 30” airports. On Halloween, nearly 80 percent of air traffic controllers were absent at the facilities that control the airspace over New York.

To try and mitigate the impact of staffing shortages, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy mandated that airlines cut up to 10 percent of their flight volume over the next few weeks. But it’s not likely to be effective.

“It’s really gonna have a negligible impact for the amount of volume that air traffic controllers are dealing with, especially as the volume ramps up as we get around the holidays,” said Marcus Miller, an air traffic controller who posts TikToks as @prophatcat. 

On Truth Social, President Donald Trump attempted a combination of threats and incentives to get controllers back to work.

“For those Air Traffic Controllers who were GREAT PATRIOTS, and didn’t take ANY TIME OFF for the ‘Democrat Shutdown Hoax,’ I will be recommending a BONUS of $10,000 per person,” he posted on the evening of November 10th. “For those that did nothing but complain, and took time off … I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU.” 

But they have been unable to stop the commercial aviation system from approaching a complete meltdown. On November 7th, the four largest US carriers canceled or delayed almost 40 percent of their flights, according to the flight tracking app Flighty. Two days later, on the 9th, they canceled half of their entire schedule. In the last four days, an average of 2,100 flights have been canceled every day, and 8,800 have been delayed. (For context, the daily averages for this time last year were 200 cancellations and 3,000 delays).

Every delay and cancellation cascades through the system. Most airlines try to keep their airplanes in the air for 12 hours or more every day; maximum time aloft means maximum time generating revenue. Similarly, airlines want to keep their pilots as busy as possible, up to the federally mandated limit of eight hours flying time per “duty period.” 

Airlines employ PhDs in math, computer science, and other quantitative fields to build sophisticated operational models that ensure that every part of their operation is optimized for efficiency and profitability. These models are planned out weeks to months in advance. And they assume normal levels of disruption — cancellation rates closer to the 2024 average of 1 percent, for example. 

When disruptions occur, recovery can be complex. It’s not possible for airlines to simply “reset” their fleets at the end of a day. They would waste millions of dollars on empty flights and crew rescheduling. Often, the only choice they have — financial, operational, or both — is to slowly recover over the course of multiple days. The major winter storm that overwhelmed Southwest’s scheduling systems in 2022 caused disruptions for nine days. And the CrowdStrike outage, which only lasted a few hours, led to several days of issues for most airlines.

The government shutdown is an entirely different beast. It is not isolated to one airline or one single day. Its effects have compounded for six weeks, impacting every airline everywhere in the country. And they will continue compounding until air traffic controllers are back to work at full strength. 

So even if the shutdown ends tomorrow, aviation won’t get back to normal for a while — at least a few days, possibly a few weeks. It’s possible that disruptions will continue all the way until Thanksgiving. And with more than 31 million people expected to fly this year, the holiday may plunge an already overstressed system back into crisis.

“Air traffic controllers don’t like being in the news,” said Miller. “If politicians want to shut down the government because of X, Y, and Z, then go for it. But don’t touch air traffic control. That just hurts everybody.”

At the end of July, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) convened a three-day public hearing to investigate January’s mid-air collision over Washington, DC that killed 67 people. After the hearing, two conclusions were inescapable.

First, the disaster should have been prevented by existing safety rules. And second, the government regulators responsible for air safety have become hesitant to enforce those rules, especially when it means standing up to industry demands for more flights and lower costs. 

Instead of fixing the regulatory state’s institutional cowardice, however, the Trump administration is moving to undermine it even further. The crisis in aviation safety has finally come to a head at precisely the moment when the wrong people are in charge of it.

There’s an old truism in aviation: regulations are written in blood. And there used to be quite a lot of it. Between 1960 and 1990, more than a thousand people died worldwide in commercial aviation accidents every year, even though flight volumes were less than a tenth of what they are today. Pilots flew too much. Cabin safety was ignored. Airplane manufacturers didn’t know basic materials science. Innocent passengers paid the price. 

Since then, new safety standards and a culture of continuous improvement have reduced the fatal accident rate by 90 percent. Seat belt rules kept people from getting sucked out of Alaska Airlines 1282 when a section of the fuselage blew out in mid-air last year. Well-trained flight attendants evacuated passengers from actively burning airplanes twice this year without a single fatality (despite the fact that in both cases, some passengers stopped to retrieve their hand luggage). And pilots have averted multiple collisions in the air and on the ground since January 1st.

Success in safety lacks spectacle: it depends less on personal heroism than it does on following the rules. But it works.

When the rules get ignored, however, disaster follows. The NTSB investigation into the crash above Reagan National found a litany of problems that no one bothered to fix. Essential safety equipment didn’t work. Pilots were unclear about proper procedure. Air traffic control was understaffed and overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of traffic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed helicopter traffic to pass directly below landing airplanes at Reagan National, even though this traffic scheme resulted in thousands of close calls every year. Excuses were plenty, and solutions few.

“Sixty-seven people are dead,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy shouted during the hearings. “Fix it. Do better.” 

Her words perfectly encapsulate the state of aviation safety today. There are plenty of critics, but few problem-solvers. And being one would require the courage to oppose the post-Reaganite virtues of shareholder value and corporate freedom. 

Take the new head of the FAA, Bryan Bedford, the former CEO of Frontier Airlines and Republic Airways (and a onetime reality TV star like his new boss Sean Duffy, and his boss Donald Trump). In spite of falling public confidence in aviation, he’s already initiated an RFK Jr.-style attack on foundational safety regulations just to make airlines more profitable.

During his confirmation, Bedford signaled that he was open to repealing two specific rules. The first requires airline pilots to accumulate 1,500 flight-hours of experience before they can earn their Air Transport Pilot (ATP) license. It was passed following the crash of Colgan Air 3407 in 2009, which was attributed to pilot error due to insufficient training. The second is the mandatory retirement age of 65 for pilots. This was set in 2007 to match international safety standards.

Under the guise of “just asking questions,” he called the standards “arbitrary” and unsupported by data. He also said that they contributed to pilot shortages, a claim he has repeated for almost a decade. 

He’s wrong on the merits: multiple studies by academics and regulators have affirmed that the “protective effect of flight experience” increases with time, and that the majority of accidents occur before pilots reach 1,100 flight-hours of experience. Conversely, pilot performance starts to measurably degrade beyond age 63, and pilots above age 65 are at higher risk of “incapacitating events” that make an accident 10,000 times more likely. 

But he’s less concerned about the facts than he is about disrupting the labor market in ways he never could as a corporate CEO. 

Under Bedford, Republic was notorious for its “highly inferior” pay structure. In 2016, a year in which the FAA licensed a record number of new airline pilots, Republic had so much trouble recruiting and retaining pilots that it declared bankruptcy. In a competitive market, Bedford’s strategy didn’t work.

But as FAA Administrator, Bedford can bend the market to his will. Removing the hours requirement would flood the market with new pilots who would earn entry-level wages. Paradoxically, raising the retirement age would create artificially cheap labor, too. Because other countries still have mandatory age limits, pilots over 65 would not be able to fly international routes. Instead, they could only accept low-paying domestic routes on smaller airplanes. Both moves would effectively create industry-wide wage cuts via regulation — a favorite trick of the Trump administration. 

Unsurprisingly, pilots themselves are overwhelmingly against both proposals. Less than five percent of pilots support raising the age limit past 65, or removing it altogether. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot of the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight, blasted Bedford for his stance on the 1,500 hour rule for its impact on safety. 

“The nomination of Bryan Bedford for FAA Administrator puts the integrity of our aviation safety system at extreme risk,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “Bedford has indicated that he would reduce regulations and let the airlines regulate themselves. That’s insane.”

Despite these objections, Bedford was confirmed by a 53-43 vote. This was the narrowest margin for any FAA Administrator in history; most Administrators, including his immediate predecessor Michael Whitaker, have been confirmed unanimously. 

Airlines have taken his divisive appointment as a signal that “minimum” safety regulations can now be minimized even more. 

This June, American Airlines received approval to lower its flight attendant staffing levels on some of its new 787-9 airplanes. Typically, US-based airlines assign enough flight attendants so that each one can cover a single emergency exit in case of an evacuation. In this reduced scheme, a single flight attendant would be responsible for both emergency exits at the back of Economy class — a section of the airplane that seats up to 124 passengers.

Sara Nelson, who represents 55,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said that staffing guidelines were set half a century ago and haven’t been touched since then. 

“We’ve got a regulatory agency that hasn’t kept up with the realities of the cabin,” she told The Verge. “Seats closer together, more people on the plane than ever before, more complications in the cabin.”

Flight attendants must also perform a wide variety of emergency duties, from using defibrillators to monitoring for possible security threats. As aviation’s first responders, they are stretched to capacity as-is. Reducing their levels below the minimum will make it nearly impossible to do their jobs.

Ultimately, Nelson’s concern isn’t just about a single airplane type. It’s about the precedent it sets. Historically, as soon as one major airline reduces staffing, Wall Street demands that the others quickly follow suit in order to reduce costs. If the whole industry follows American’s lead, it will be the clearest signal yet that those in power care more about fatter profit margins than they do about passenger safety. 

To be clear, a regulatory rollback probably won’t cause significantly more airplanes to fall out of the sky. But it will create real risks. 

Those risks might look like Aeroflot 1492 in 2019, where a slower-than-expected evacuation led to 41 fatalities. Or they might look like the disorganized and delayed reaction to the Air India 171 crash from India’s severely understaffed aviation regulator, which allowed misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread. Or they might look like higher burnout rates among pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers who must substitute individual effort for the hollowed-out institutions that no longer support them. 

In short, the attack on regulations will reduce the margin of safety everywhere, and erode trust in air travel — all for the sake of letting the industry pad its margins.

This willingness to abandon safety standards in the name of profits is wrong for aviation, says Nelson.

“It’s a continued pressure and downward spiral. It’s shocking, but not surprising.”

In Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has escalated its enforcement operations in extremely public ways, conducting surprise raids, arresting lawmakers, and launching a new Florida detention center with an alt-right media blitz.

But ICE is growing in less obvious ways, too. Since January, it has expanded the shadowy network of charter airlines that shuttles tens of thousands of detainees around the country and the world on deportation flights. This network’s official designation is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations division. Many people just call it “ICE Air.” 

ICE Air is no less brutal than the agency’s heavy-handed field operations. But its brutality comes in the form of scale, speed, and efficiency — attributes that you probably want in a commercial airline, but not in an increasingly weaponized tool of law enforcement.

When it was founded in 2003, ICE had no internal capacity to deport people. It relied on the US Marshals Service to operate deportation flights on the small fleet of Boeing 737s primarily used to transport federal inmates around the country.

Removal flights quickly became an important tool for ICE. They were an efficient way to deport large numbers of people without the public spectacle of using commercial airplanes or public airports. In 2005, the US Marshals flew almost 100,000 deportees on behalf of ICE, versus only 58,000 inmates for the Department of Justice. By the end of the decade, the Marshals were deporting more than 170,000 people every year but did not have the capacity to handle any more. 

So, under Barack Obama’s administration, the agency turned to the private sector. In 2010, ICE began working with a company called Classic Air Charter to broker deportation flights directly from charter airlines. During the global war on terror, the company served as an intermediary for the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, sourcing charter flights that shuttled terrorism suspects to CIA black sites around the world. Deportation would simply be an expansion of its government business. 

And a far more lucrative one, too. Contracts for the CIA’s infrequent rendition flights rarely broke into seven-figure territory. In contrast, charter contracts from ICE would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Since then, ICE Air has grown into an operation rivaling that of a small commercial airline. It operates a fleet of 12 large airplanes (currently a mix of Boeing 737s, MD-80s, and Airbus A320s) every day, plus a reserve fleet of more than 100 airplanes of various sizes that it can activate for one-off flights. 

ICE does not make its routes, schedules, or even its flight statistics public. But a FOIA request from the University of Washington revealed that between 2010 and 2018, ICE Air flew 1.7 million people on 15,000 deportation flights. Using airplane-tracking databases such as the ADS-B Exchange, the immigration rights nonprofit Witness at the Border estimates that ICE Air has flown another 10,600 deportation flights between January 2020 and May 2025.

“There is no disclosure, there is no reporting, this is by design not transparent,” says Thomas Cartwright, who leads the tracking project for Witness at the Border. “People deserve to know what is happening.”

On board these flights, conditions are often dehumanizing and sometimes even dangerous. 

The official “ICE Air Operations Handbook” requires that every deportee “be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons” during their flight. They are denied access to contact lenses, prescription medicine, belts, and jackets. They receive a meal of a single dry sandwich and a granola bar (chips and condiments not allowed), but are not guaranteed access to a restroom. 

Deportees allege that ICE Air personnel often make this experience even worse. There are hundreds of allegations of verbal, physical, and in some cases even sexual abuse of deportees since 2010. 

Sometimes, this abuse borders on torture. In 2012, a woman who was pregnant with triplets began to bleed during a deportation flight to El Salvador, but the crew refused to declare an emergency or divert the airplane. She miscarried shortly after landing. In 2016, ICE officials allegedly used tasers to subdue deportees on a flight to Bangladesh. In 2020, multiple deportees on a flight to Cameroon accused ICE officers of placing them in a straitjacket-like emergency restraint called “the WRAP” for up to 12 hours at a time, resulting in bleeding, bruising, respiratory issues, and in some cases permanent injury afterward. 

“In Cameroon, I had been beaten with a machete until my feet swelled and bled, and I was struck again and again with a metal belt buckle,” said one deportee in a legal complaint. “But the day I was put in the WRAP by ICE, I wanted to die. I have never felt such horrible pain.”

Officially, ICE says that reports of abuse are overblown, and that it “has the utmost confidence in the professionalism of [its] workforce and their adherence to … policy.”

But it has no real impetus to change. Public outrage so far has focused on enforcement and detention activities; ICE Air has been largely ignored. The Department of Homeland Security has never provided meaningful oversight for ICE or any of the department’s other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration. And no president — Obama, Biden, or Trump — has intervened to stop it or even scale ICE Air back.

ICE Air has already played a key role in several high-profile deportation cases this year. It transported Mahmoud Khalil to a processing facility in Jena, Louisiana, within hours of his arrest in New York. Over three days, it took Kilmar Ábrego García to two facilities in Louisiana and Texas before deporting him to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. The scale and speed of ICE Air allows the agency to move detainees faster than courts can react — even, or perhaps especially, in the case of wrongful deportations. 

Now, the Trump administration wants to triple the volume of deportations to more than 1 million a year. To that end, the massive budget bill signed into law on July 4th will add $75 billion to ICE’s budget over the next four years, on top of the more than $11 billion it was already planning to spend next year. ICE will soon become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.

Its air division is growing to meet this new demand. Last year, the agency switched air brokers from Classic Air Charter to CSI Aviation, another company with long-standing ties to the Department of Defense. In May, CSI signed a lease for three aircraft from Avelo Airlines, a relatively new (and heavily debt-burdened) low-cost carrier. With its expanded fleet, ICE Air operated a record 1,089 flights in May and 1,187 flights in June, nearly double its flight volume from a year prior. And it now flies to a growing list of countries, from Saudi Arabia to South Sudan, that have agreed to accept ICE deportees regardless of nationality — an eerie echo of the “extraordinary rendition” CIA flights that served as the original pattern for ICE Air.

“Our infrastructure is going to be huge,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Fox News after the budget bill’s passage. “Morale’s never been higher.”

On June 2nd, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to Newark Liberty International Airport to celebrate the reopening of runway 4L-22R. This was unusual: few runway openings are glamorous enough to warrant a visit from the airport’s CEO, let alone a cabinet secretary. But as we reported last month, few airports have come to symbolize USDOT’s mismanagement of the air traffic control system as much as Newark. 

The ceremony and press conference was meant to transform Newark into a different symbol — one of progress and action. In his speech, Duffy positioned Newark’s problems as solvable, and the people onstage — who included the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Acting Administrator Chris Rocheleau, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, and several other dignitaries — as the problem-solvers.

Together, they’d gotten union labor to rebuild a runway in 47 days instead of 60; they’d convinced Verizon to expedite a new fiber-optic cable; they’d identified and fixed the “glitch in the system” that left Newark’s air traffic controllers blind and unable to speak to pilots for several terrifying minutes. 

Because of this whirlwind of activity, Rocheleau expected that Newark would soon be able to increase its flight volume by 25 percent, or nearly 12 additional flights per hour. 

Or, as Kirby put it, “This is such a seminal turning point for not just the near term but the long term of Newark.” 

Within two days, all three men were proven wrong. On the evening of June 4th, a shortage of air traffic controllers forced Newark to issue a ground stop, delaying more than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred four days later. Optimism alone cannot solve infrastructure problems that have been decades in the making. 

Especially when they are far more widespread than most people realize. Besides the three days of crisis at Newark — on April 28th, May 1st, and May 9th — there have been at least a dozen instances where equipment or staffing problems significantly affected operations at air traffic control centers around the country this year. 

The most serious incidents occurred at air traffic control facilities in Kansas City in January, Oakland in February, and Denver in May. Each time, controllers were unable to see or communicate with pilots after radar and radio failures. The Denver outage lasted for only 90 seconds, but the others persisted for more than an hour. Each one resulted in widespread delays and cancellations.

In March at Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), an electrical fire blamed on “overloaded aging equipment” halted operations for more than two hours, leading to 50 flight cancellations and more than 150 delays. 

And twice this year, the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system — a real-time database of every flying hazard and traffic advisory that covers the entirety of American airspace — has gone down for several hours at a time, leading to more than 1,300 delays and cancellations.

It isn’t just the technology that’s causing problems. The FAA is short more than 3,000 air traffic controllers nationwide. This shortage has forced several air traffic control facilities to issue “staffing triggers,” reducing the number of flights in their airspace to accommodate reduced controller levels. Staffing triggers have occurred air traffic control facilities responsible for Austin twice, the regional airports around New York three times, and once each at Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami this year. 

Even this may not present the full picture of the depth and breadth of the air traffic control system crisis. This list only includes incidents that have been reported by local news outlets, or that can be retrieved in the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) advisory database — a system that purges most advisories after two weeks. 

To put this in perspective, there have been 162 days in 2025 so far. On at least 16 of those days — nearly one in 10 — a major portion of the air traffic system has failed somewhere in America. 

A recent Government Accountability Office report from September 2024 found that 90 percent of the nation’s critical air traffic control infrastructure was due or past due for a “technology refresh.” Nearly half of the 138 systems surveyed were “considered unsustainable” or “potentially unsustainable” due to shortfalls in funding, insufficient maintenance expertise, or even a lack of spare parts. (For example, a 2023 FAA review found that the systems that track airplanes in the air and on the ground use more than 700 beacons that are more than 20 years old, and whose manufacturers no longer make spare parts.)  

The FAA has been aware of this problem for decades. In 2003, the agency began to scope a “Next Generation” air traffic control system. This NextGen system would replace the current infrastructure that had been “developed in the 1940s and 1950s … and was no longer able to handle increases in air traffic,” and would be delivered by 2025. 

But the delivery year has arrived, and NextGen still exists mainly on paper. The agency has yet to achieve even its minimum target of launching every major NextGen system at a single major airport by 2025, let alone the “full implementation” that it originally promised by the end of the year. Some critical systems may not come online until 2030, including the replacement for the air-to-ground communications system that has failed at Newark, Denver, and elsewhere. 

Air traffic controllers are still asked to maintain the same levels of safety despite using equipment that’s decades out of date. But they aren’t being supported, either. The vast majority of air traffic control centers are below target staffing levels. More than half don’t even meet a lower “FAA standard” of 85 percent of target staffing levels. To compensate, controllers are often required to work six days a week, 10 hours a day. One air traffic controller on Reddit called this “the worst time to be an American ATC since 1981” — the year that air traffic controllers went on strike for better wages, and President Ronald Reagan responded by firing more than 11,000 of them.

On May 8th, Secretary Duffy unveiled a “Brand New Air Traffic Control System Plan,” an eight-page “framework to reinvest in the National Airspace System.” While the ambition is there, the details are decidedly not. Problems this intractable will require several years of sustained funding, political support, and proper management and administration. This combination of factors has not existed since at least the early 2000s, if indeed it ever has.

So while Secretary Duffy is right to acknowledge the work that’s been done to fix the problems at Newark and around the country, there’s still a long way to go — and no one silver bullet that can fix two decades’ worth of neglect.

There are too many planes in the sky. In 2024, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) supervised nearly 16.8 million flights in American airspace — half a million more than the year prior. To manage all of those airplanes, however, the FAA uses an air traffic control system designed in the early 1990s — when features like trackballs and color monitors were new, and air traffic controllers handled less than half as many flights every year. 

Like many government agencies, the FAA has faced chronic budget constraints and poor oversight in the ensuing two decades. Not only is its system functionally obsolete; it’s also badly understaffed. Too often, the agency must scramble to find the least-bad solution for its mounting problems — and not all of these solutions are good or even safe.

One such scenario has been unfolding at Newark Liberty International Airport for the last year. And it hasn’t just created delays and cancellations — it has put people’s safety at risk.

Outages

Newark airport became national news starting on Monday, April 28th. Around 1:27PM, pilots abruptly lost contact with the controllers that oversee the airport’s approach and departure airspace, known as Newark Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). 

“Can you hear us?” asked one United pilot. After a beat of silence, another pilot keyed the radio. “Hey Approach, are you there?” A third chimed in, his call sign more of a question. “Austrian eight-niner?”

Several more seconds passed before Newark TRACON came back on the air.

“United 1951, how do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear now,” the first pilot replied.

For the moment, normal operations resumed — though controllers were worried about the possibility of another outage. “Upjet 905, join the final approach course,” said one controller, then prudently added, “if you don’t hear me, you can continue on the approach.”

Seconds later, every radar screen at Newark approach went dark.

“Radar contact lost. We just lost our radar.”

Suddenly blind and unsure if they could even maintain comms with pilots, Newark’s controllers did what they were trained to do — get everyone to a safe holding place until the situation stabilized. To one United pilot in final descent: “stay on the arrival and maintain 6000.” 

To a private pilot, also preparing to land: “climb and maintain 4500.” They diverted another private pilot off to a nearby small airport: “Continue on towards Caldwell, call Caldwell Tower 119.8.” And they told a fourth private pilot passing that it was now up to him to maintain visual separation from other aircraft: “we’re just gonna have to cut you loose.”

‘Disruption is significant’

Air traffic controllers prepare for such contingencies, according to Dr. Hassan Shahidi, the president and CEO of the nonprofit FlightSafety Foundation.  

“Emergency traffic is prioritized,” he said. “Flights may be held on the ground. Nearby centers may take over some services.”

Even in the best-case scenarios, however, “disruption is significant.” 

Controllers at Newark only lost radio and radar for about a minute and a half until backup systems kicked in. And no airplanes crashed or even had a near miss. But it took the rest of the afternoon just to get operations restarted. No one took off again until 5PM, more than three hours later. At least a dozen flights were canceled, and 30 others were diverted to nearby airports. Higher-than-normal delays persisted for more than a week after the outage as airlines dealt with planes and crews that were out of position. 

Another outage occurred a week and a half later on May 9th. At 3:55AM, radar displays went out twice.

“Imma hand you off here, our scopes just went black again,” said one of the controllers as she passed one flight over to JFK and LaGuardia controllers, who still had radar. “If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure on them to fix this stuff.”

She was right to be exasperated. This was the sixth time in only nine months that Newark TRACON had lost radio and/or radar. But only now, after two major aviation accidents in January and February, were people paying attention.

The strangest thing of all is that the FAA appears to have brought the problem on itself — thanks in part to endemic government issues such as underfunding and bureaucracy, but also to the agency’s track record of bad risk management when it comes to modern technology. 

A vicious cycle

“The airspace around New York is the most complex in the world,” says Michael McCormick, a former air traffic controller and current professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Controllers in this sector manage more than 6,000 flights per day between the 30-plus airports, heliports, and seaplane bases in the area. And almost a quarter of that volume is handled by Newark TRACON.

Those controllers aren’t actually located at the airport. Beginning in 1978, the FAA centralized approach and departure traffic for every airport in the greater New York City area into the N90 “super facility” in Westbury, Long Island. N90 was and still is one of the largest TRACON control facilities in the country, with 200 controllers on staff. Their colocation, along with a direct feed into the FAA’s radar, satellite, and flight data system called STARS, makes operations more efficient and emergencies easier to handle. (For example, close coordination between N90 controllers helped guide the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight to a safe landing.)

But since the late ’70s, the job has gotten harder. In 1980, N90 handled an average of 2,200 flights per day. Last year, the number was 3,400. But pay has failed to keep pace both with the increasing complexity of the job, and the ever-growing cost of living in New York. In 1978, the median wage for an air traffic controller was around $33,000 a year. In the intervening decades, air traffic wages have increased fourfold, to $127,000 a year. But the cost of living in the area has increased even faster, by more than five times, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s a vicious cycle. Low pay relative to cost of living means that N90 can’t keep people the way that facilities in Dallas or Denver can. And retention problems at N90 have led to mandatory overtime and six-day workweeks, further increasing burnout and losses. For the last five years, the FAA has attempted to solve N90’s “specific recruiting challenges.” But it failed. 

By the summer of 2023, N90 could muster only two-thirds of its target of 300 controllers. The Newark sector was down to half strength. (Other facilities in lower-cost cities such as Dallas or Denver are closer to 80 percent). Delays were inevitable; in the middle of peak travel season, one out of every three flights out of Newark was delayed by an hour or more. 

Making things worse

By 2024, the FAA decided that more drastic action was needed. It gave up on N90 and decided to move Newark TRACON operations into the better-staffed Philadelphia facility. In a vacuum, it might have seemed like a decent tradeoff: disrupt the lives of a few controllers in order to reduce disruptions for thousands of flights and millions of passengers every year. But the FAA made an already marginal decision even worse. 

First, the majority of Newark’s controllers refused to make the move at all. Eventually, the FAA authorized relocation bonuses of up to $100,000. Even then, only 17 of the original 33 controllers agreed to move from N90. Reassignments brought the total up to 24, still short of the pre-move totals — and far short of the 63-person target. 

Second, the FAA failed to invest in the data infrastructure required to support remote operations. To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure. Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.

The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous. 

Especially when combined with the FAA’s already dire infrastructure. Every week, the air traffic control system in the United States suffers around 700 outages. Its systems are decades old, and are often held together with improvised fixes — daisy-chained power strips, cables protected only by aluminum foil, old radar systems being cooled by tabletop fans. And in February, at the direction of Elon Musk’s DOGE, the FAA laid off more than 100 workers, including the maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists needed to keep unreliable systems in working order.

The FAA’s own analysis downplayed these risks, however. According to an internal study obtained by CNN, experts calculated that the risk of a critical failure for Newark’s remote feeds were one in 11 million, or a roughly “seven-nines” reliability standard that allowed only three seconds of downtime in a given year. It’s not clear how the agency calculated this figure. And FAA standards only require a “five-nines” standard, which allows up to five minutes of downtime in any given year. This math removed the last remaining impediment to the move. 

As of this writing, the remote data feeds into Newark TRACON have been down for around 10 minutes over the course of 10 months — nearly two and a half times beyond the “five-nines” standard, and 200 times beyond the “seven-nines” estimate from its report. 

A knife’s edge

It’s easy to state the obvious. The FAA should plan better. It should raise salaries and hire more people. It should replace old tech with new. (The agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Such glib solutioning ignores the agency’s intractable problems of time and money. It hired 1,500 new air traffic controllers last year and will hire 2,000 more this year, but many of them won’t be fully certified until 2026 at the earliest. It contracted with Verizon to build new fiber-optic links between FAA facilities, but many of these won’t come online for up to a decade. And its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003.

Although the agency’s budget has grown 50 percent over the last decade to $24 billion, it still isn’t enough to overcome decades of underinvestment. Last year, the FAA had to stretch a $1.7 billion maintenance budget to cover nearly $5.2 billion in outstanding repairs at air traffic control facilities. It had to spend nearly $532 million of its 2025 budget a year early to cover “uncontrollable employee compensation costs” such as mandatory overtime and the “surge” in hiring for new air traffic controllers. 

Meanwhile, DOGE consultants have focused on finding money for new Starlink contracts and reducing oversight of SpaceX at the FAA. Cronyism, it turns out, has little impact on (or interest in) the government’s most difficult challenges. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised us “safe, state-of-the-art air travel,” but the FAA’s history (and the largely detail-free, eight-page “Brand New Air Traffic Control Plan”) suggest that it will be a long time coming. While we wait, we can at least console ourselves that air traffic controllers have learned how to give us safe air travel in the absence of state-of-the-art air travel. 

Still, the entire system rests on a knife’s edge between safe operations and potential disaster. The smallest disruption can throw the entire system into chaos — putting thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and the reputation of American aviation as the safest in the world in harm’s way.