The crisis in American air travel

I’m scheduled to take my 1-year-old on a three-hour flight just over a week from now. Probably a headache, under normal circumstances, but a bona fide nightmare amid the recent airport bedlam. I was thus relieved — overjoyed, really — to learn that the security line chaos is easing at many airports. But that doesn’t address the larger, longer-term safety and reliability challenges in American air travel.

Today, we’re looking at two questions: Why is US air travel so bad? And what can be done to improve it, short of taking Amtrak?

US airlines have gradually acculturated travelers to a pretty awful flight experience: smaller seats, middling snacks, fees for everything you can imagine. But even by the low standards of modern air travel, the aviation industry seems to be in particular crisis right now, plagued by staffing shortages, security delays, and a string of terrifying incidents that have some fliers questioning whether air travel is safe at all.

Those issues only got worse during the partial government shutdown, which forced some 50,000 TSA agents to work without pay. Unscheduled callouts and resignations slowed security screenings nationwide, snarling travelers in hours-long lines.

On Monday, TSA agents received their first paycheck in over a month, easing the bottleneck at many airports. But even if things go back to normal, normal is still…pretty awful.

One buzzy option for righting the ship — or, fine, the plane — comes courtesy the libertarian minds at the Heritage Foundation (and several other conservative think tanks). They’ve proposed that the United States allow airports to hire private security contractors to do much of TSA’s work.

These private contractors would check IDs, scan luggage, conduct pat-downs and — importantly, in our current political atmosphere — continue working through government shutdowns. The model is already in place at roughly 20 US airports, including Kansas City and San Francisco.

Proponents argue that privatization would reduce costs and make TSA more efficient. But even if that’s true, it wouldn’t address many of the other systemic issues causing delays and safety scares at US airports. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 80 percent of the country’s air traffic control infrastructure is “obsolete” or “unsustainable.”

That includes 612 radar systems that date back to the 1980s and other equipment so old that the FAA has to use eBay for replacement parts. Equipment failures can cause flight delays and cancellations, to say nothing of potential accidents. Last summer, Congress approved more than $12 billion to begin modernizing that equipment, starting with things like replacing old-school copper cables. But the FAA says it will need another $20 billion to fully retrofit the air traffic control system.

Meanwhile, the FAA is also short about 3,000 air traffic controllers, which doesn’t exactly improve airport safety or performance. Only two controllers were working at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when an Air Canada Express passenger jet collided with a fire truck nine days ago.

The Trump administration has launched a number of initiatives to staff up air control towers and other facilities, but it’s also exacerbated the problem by, for example, eliminating FAA support staff during DOGE’s cost-cutting spree. The last government shutdown, which ended in November, also prompted the resignation of hundreds of air traffic controllers and trainees.

In the absence of durable systemic solutions, American travelers are left to do that most American of things: fend for themselves. Many airports are still urging travelers to show up hours early for their flights, and some fliers are traveling by train, instead.

Unfortunately, America’s passenger rail system is also something of a train wreck. And don’t even think about driving — have you seen gas prices?!