Understaffed and working with antiquated technology, America’s aviation professionals handle millions of domestic flights each year.
Yet the United States had zero multiple-fatality commercial airline crashes for 16 years—an unprecedented safety streak that made Washington politicians complacent, aviation expert Jay Ratliff told The Epoch Times.
They took safe skies for granted and allowed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “to drift into this unbelievable sea of outdated technology,“ said Ratliff, who provides aviation commentary to radio stations nationwide. “To say that the FAA needs an upgrade would be an insult to the word ‘upgrade.'”
Now, the need for FAA reform has taken on new urgency.
President Donald Trump had already taken steps to begin revamping the FAA when a commercial airliner disaster struck on his 10th day in office. Other high-profile plane crashes followed, stoking concerns even more. Trump’s new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is calling for a total overhaul of the FAA.
And industry advocates are urging Congress to approve emergency funding that would bolster staffing and replace outmoded equipment.
“We’re past the inflection point now; I think that’s clear to everybody,” Nicholas Calio, CEO of Airlines for America, told a congressional subcommittee on March 4.
Holding a paper strip in one hand and 1980s-era computer floppy disks in the other, Calio said it’s unacceptable that air-traffic controllers and technicians remain understaffed—and are still using these old types of media to store information. “We are better than this. Our country is better than this,” his written testimony to the House of Representatives aviation subcommittee states.
But Calio and others urged Congress to remove stumbling blocks from the FAA’s path. Over the years, dozens of threatened government shutdowns—including one that Congress is facing on March 14—helped stall the FAA’s progress. That’s because even the possibility of a shutdown forces the agency to put training and technology projects on hold, causing advances to sputter, sometimes for months, congressional witnesses said.
While mourning the recent crashes, aviation advocates say the tragedies added momentum to safety improvement efforts and created consensus for change. “We believe we have a real opportunity to get something done for the first time in 30 years,” Calio’s written testimony states.
Calio, Ratliff, and other experts with decades of experience remain confident about air travel safety, despite the rash of accidents in early 2025. But they say that maintaining safety will require acting quickly after years of stagnation. “We want action, not political debate,” Calio said. He warned of a “very small window for action.”
Flyers on High Alert
Many people report feeling leery of air travel following several deadly incidents, even though federal data show airline accidents remain extremely rare. Early 2025 saw fewer aviation incidents than the same period a year ago, according to National Transportation Safety Board data.
Calio said, “Commercial air travel in the United States is the safest mode of transportation in the world ... It is literally safer than walking out of your own front door.”
Still, aviation incidents have been covered prominently in U.S. news coverage and social media chatter since Jan. 29, when an American Eagle regional jet collided in mid-air with a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
That catastrophe marked the first major airline crash in the United States since Feb. 12, 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 nose-dived into the ground near Buffalo, New York, claiming 49 lives.
The Potomac tragedy struck on Duffy’s second day as transportation secretary.
Within hours of the crash, Trump ordered Duffy and the FAA to immediately review hiring decisions and safety-protocol changes made during the past four years. During that time, President Joe Biden’s administration had emphasized “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) rather than merit, Trump said.
The new president directed Duffy to take all necessary steps “to achieve uncompromised aviation safety,” including replacing any personnel who might have substandard qualifications.
Only a day after Trump penned that order, a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia. Seven people died, including one victim on the ground.
Analyses of Accidents Pending
The fact that no one died in the Toronto crash is a testimonial to a well-trained flight crew that quickly evacuated the passengers, Tom McClain, a retired United Airlines captain and Air Force flight training supervisor, told The Epoch Times.Much remains unknown as investigations into the recent crashes continue; the results almost surely will yield lessons that can be used to enhance aviation safety.
Paul Rinaldi, a 30-year FAA employee who now serves as an aviation consultant, lamented to the aviation subcommittee, “There is a generally held truism in the FAA that ‘our rules are written in blood’ because accidents seem to be our catalyst for meaningful action.”
“Safety industries, such as aviation, rely on redundancy. Aircraft have three or four redundant systems. But the FAA has reverted to a fix-on-fail policy, eliminating the redundancy that makes the system safe,” he said, adding that the FAA is not solely responsible. “Most of these decisions were a result of congressional actions—or, perhaps more accurately, inaction.”
In response to the 2009 Colgan Air crash, Congress passed the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010. That law instituted new requirements for pilot training, qualifications, and rest periods—all of which investigators cited as factors in the fatal crash.Key questions in the Jan. 29 helicopter–plane collision include whether the Black Hawk was flying at a higher-than-authorized altitude, whether its crew heard important radio transmissions, and whether the crew members wore night-vision goggles that prevented them from seeing the airplane.
Another possible factor: the night of the collision, only one air-traffic controller was handling a workload that is typically carried out by two employees.
Staffing and Training Difficult
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a labor union and safety group, said that a shortage of air traffic controllers reached “crisis level” a decade ago.The group says there are now about 10,800 air-traffic controllers—and 3,600 more are needed. Finding qualified candidates is a struggle partly because of the high-stress, no-room-for-error nature of the job. In addition, training is intense and certification can take several years; large percentages of trainees “wash out”—either quit or fail, congressional witnesses said.
After visiting the FAA’s training academy, Duffy unveiled a plan for “recruiting the best and brightest” for air traffic control roles. Candidates who earn the highest score on a skills test will be given priority admittance to the academy; new hires will receive a 30 percent boost in starting salaries, Duffy announced.
The FAA also needs to ramp up its existing program to attract qualified new air-traffic controller recruits through colleges, Calio said, noting that the Biden administration had partnered with only four schools “after working on this for 17 months.”
Focus on Qualifications
In recent years, personnel standards across the airline industry have been unduly influenced in attempts to lure “certain demographic groups,” McClain said.Instead, the goal should be “to make sure that the very best, most-qualified people are at the controls of that airplane” and in other safety-related jobs—without regard to the employee’s race, ethnicity, or other personal characteristics, McClain said.
Unpredictable, dangerous situations arise quickly in aviation, so it’s imperative that highly qualified, well-trained people—ranging from air-traffic controllers to flight attendants and pilots—fulfill critical roles, experts said.
Those people need to be able to troubleshoot quickly. That’s why some people in aviation circles say, “The most important piece of safety equipment on any aircraft is a well-trained crew,” McClain said.
He commended the FAA for clarifying crew training certification standards, saying the agency has done “a fantastic job” in that regard.
However, many well-trained, still-healthy commercial pilots are forced into retirement at age 65. That “arbitrary” cutoff should be discontinued and replaced with medical evaluations to determine whether older pilots remain fit for duty, he said.
‘Largest and Safest’ Airspace
FAA spokesman Rick Breitenfeldt told The Epoch Times: “The FAA manages the world’s safest and most complex aviation system.”On an average day, the agency serves more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across 29 million square miles of airspace, he said.
The number of flights is expected to increase 6.2 percent per year, a government watchdog agency reported last year—a big concern because the FAA’s aging technology is already straining under current demands.
This weakness was exposed when a notifications system failed in January 2023, requiring the FAA to halt all departures. During the two hours that it took to fix the problem, the outage caused more than 1,300 flight cancellations and nearly 10,000 delays. “Some airlines took several days to fully recover,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said.
In a September 2024 post-incident report, GAO found that 105 of the FAA’s 138 systems were “unsustainable” or “potentially unsustainable.” That’s largely because replacement parts are no longer available, and technicians who know how to keep the old systems running are retiring.
More than half of those imperiled systems relate to “safety and efficiency” in the national airspace. FAA duties include tracking weather conditions, managing air traffic, and providing communication among aviation personnel.
The FAA initially expected NextGen to be finished by 2025. But now the upgrades are expected to take at least five more years to complete, the GAO said in March 4 congressional testimony.
While the FAA attributes some delays to factors outside its control, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the GAO said the FAA needs to do a better job of managing and tracking its improvement projects. As time has passed, costs of labor and materials rise. Thus, budgeted amounts continually fall short of the actual investments needed for the improvements, the GAO found, causing further setbacks.
On March 7, the FAA announced it was taking additional “immediate action” after more than two dozen leaders from the FAA, aviation industry, and labor organizations participated in a “call to action” meeting.
The agency identified “safety drift” as a major concern. “A common thread in aviation accidents is Acceptance, Boredom and Complacency (ABC),” the FAA said.
That’s why the FAA is urging pilots to pay strict attention to pre-flight checklists, messages from the FAA, and onboard instrumentation warnings. Further, the FAA is exploring more tools for pilots to assess risks and evaluate their own performance.
In addition, the FAA is increasing efforts to improve clarity of radio communications and also has launched an analysis of “close encounters between pilots flying visually and pilots flying under air traffic control.”
Although one witness told the aviation subcommittee that the U.S. airspace system has lost its status as the global leader in airspace management, McClain opined that U.S. systems appear to be on par with those of other nations.
McClain also pointed out that improvements have been made. In particular, aspects of communication and navigation have already been modernized.
Changes Could Be Significant
Shoring up the nation’s aviation systems is important not only for the safety of citizens but also because of the industry’s economic and societal impact.
Aviation moves people, goods, and services nationally and internationally. In 2022, civil aviation—all non-military aviation activities—supported 9.4 million jobs and contributed $1.8 trillion to the U.S. economy, ranking it among the nation’s top economic sectors, a 2024 FAA report says.
Against that backdrop, the new administration might be poised to make a significant contribution to the aviation world.
“President Trump’s legacy could be as significant now as President Jimmy Carter’s was in 1978 when he ushered in the era of deregulation,” Ratliff, the radio show aviation expert, said. The 39th president’s accomplishment paved the way for competition and low-cost airfares.
Similarly, Ratliff thinks that, if this administration succeeds in making major improvements to the FAA, “we’re going to look back at the Donald Trump years, and say, ‘Wow, he really helped bring the future to commercial aviation.’”
