A Democratic politician and the union of aviation safety specialists have put US President Donald Trump’s firing of hundreds of government employees in focus after a Delta Air Lines jet with 80 people onboard turned turtle on landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Tuesday.
The Delta crash is the fourth major aviation accident in this year already in North America. On January 29 night, an American Airlines plane collided with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington DC’s Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people in the deadliest air crash in the US in 20 years and sparking questions about staffing at Reagan National’s air traffic control.
Two days later, a small medical plane crashed in northeast Philadelphia a minute after taking off, killing six people on board and one more on the ground.
On February 6, a small plane carrying 10 people vanished en route to Alaska.
The Trump administration’s decision to lay off FAA employees in response to the January 29 crash in particular has met with criticism from the Democratic Party and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?” asked Pete Buttigieg on X [formerly called Twitter], a Democratic Party leader and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
The PASS [Professional Aviation Safety Specialists] in an official statement said: “We are troubled and disappointed by the administration’s decision to fire FAA probationary employees PASS represents without cause nor based on performance or conduct.”
The PASS said that “several hundred employees” were sent messages “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address, not an official .gov email address”.
“These employees were devoted to their jobs and the safety critical mission of the FAA. This draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin,” it added.
In an answer to Buttigieg’s question asked on X, US transportation secretary Sean Duffy said that of the “staggering 45,000 employees” that FAA has, “less than 400 were let go, and they were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago.”
Duffy added: “Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.”
In another post, Duffy mentioned that members of Elon Musk’s SpaceX team would visit the air traffic control system command center in Virginia “to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.”
