How we stretched our aviation system to the brink
Newark Airport Traffic Control Staffing Shortages Continues To Cause Delays
Planes on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport on May 14, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Kelsey Piper
Kelsey Piper is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox’s effective altruism-inspired section on the world’s biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter.
Air travel is remarkably, astonishingly safe.
Every year, commercial US airlines take more than 800 million domestic passengers to their destinations, and in a typical year, zero of them are killed and very few are injured. It’s a track record made possible by a fairly intense commitment to safety.
But increasingly over the last few years, we’ve been testing these limits.
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Right now the example in the headlines is New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport, which had three air traffic controllers on duty when it was supposed to have 14 and which over the last couple of weeks suffered three “communications blackouts” where air traffic controllers couldn’t communicate with approaching planes.
But it’s not just Newark. There has been an alarming rise in near-misses, communications blackouts, and other serious problems over the last few years at airports across the country, often a consequence of understaffing and high traffic. The midair collision near Reagan National Airport in Washington earlier this year that killed over 60 people was the deadliest air crash in the US since 2001.
Even with the Washington disaster, very few of these incidents, thankfully, get anyone killed.
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