From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:03
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, when a plane lands upside down, it's hard to tell if it's a miracle or a calamity, but that's the situation dozens of people found themselves when a flight from Minneapolis made a crash landing in Canada on Monday. Plane crashes are rare, and of the 1000s of flights flown a day, the chances of one crash are incredibly low, but it's not impossible. This week has seen two crashes. Last month, there was a mid air collision in Washington, DC, and another flight crashed in Philadelphia. Despite the statistics, this news is enough to make even seasoned travelers think twice about boarding a plane, and it's raising important questions about the efficacy of airline safety, especially in the wake of Donald Trump's efforts to gut the Federal Aviation Administration. Today on lever time, we're going to try and find some of these answers. How safe is flying? Should you be concerned if you're boarding a flight this week? And perhaps most importantly, why is this all happening?
So later this week, David Sirota, the levers founder, and I are going to be meeting up in New York City. Since I'm based in Washington, DC, I can take the train up. But coming from Colorado, David's gonna need to fly. Yeah,
David Sirota 1:22
I'm going to the airport, risking my life to go to the airport. Yes, are you feeling I'm actually pretty nervous, and have been nervous all week about it, even though I know the stats that's that's the weird part of this is like, it's like, you know the stats about how many 1000s of flights per day land safely, but then you also see the news, which feels not reassuring. I've been
Arjun Singh 1:53
hearing this sentiment a lot this week. Earlier in the week, on Monday, a Delta Airlines Flight made a crash landing, leaving dozens of passengers literally hanging upside down and then forced to go out and evacuate. But then Wednesday morning, I heard the news of another plane crash, this time in Arizona. And it definitely doesn't help that President Trump and Elon Musk just fired a bunch of workers at the Federal Aviation Administration. There's
David Sirota 2:20
not one voter in the United States, Republican or Democrat who voted for a candidate, wanting that candidate to dismantle the FAA and make flying more scary. But
Arjun Singh 2:35
while it seems like the industry is in crisis, I think the real question that everybody's feeling is, should we be more concerned about air travel? I
Bill McGee 2:43
think, yes, it is safe to fly. I fly myself. I'll be flying again soon, in a couple of weeks. People I love are flying all the time, but I get it, and I get why people are concerned. I'm not dismissive of it, as I hear some others are.
Arjun Singh 2:56
This is Bill McGee, an airline industry veteran who's actually a licensed dispatch operator, and he spent a long time working for airlines today. Bill is a senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic liberties project, and he's literally who I think of whenever I want to know about the airline industry.
So is there a through line between the airline crashes and when you're thinking about airline safety and potentially what could have happened, what needs to be reformed. What are the similarities between these crashes and what are some of the important distinctions to understand about them? Because it sometimes can look like, Oh my God, all the planes are crashing, but it doesn't seem like these are all happening for the exact same reason. You're
Bill McGee 3:43
exactly right. I'm really glad that you asked me that, because I think it is a key question. I hear it a lot myself because of the work I do. I can't tell you how many texts and phone calls I've gotten in the last couple of days, particularly last week, where people have said to me, what's going on is it safe to fly? What's happening you know, is the sky falling. Basically, if we look at the three airline events, the event it, you know, with American eagle and the army helicopter, the mid air collision near DCA airport. And then we look at Bering air, which was an aircraft that was due into Nome Alaska and disappeared off the radar. And it turns out it crashed into the water, into an ice flow. And then the event in Toronto, where a delta connection flight landed very hard and very quickly and somersaulted over. And basically, you know, landed on its roof. And thankfully, in that case, everybody on board got out safely, with no fatalities. There were some injuries. When you look at that so far, and you always have to add this caveat. It has to be stated because we have such immediate 24/7 media attention now, and of course, social media and people want answers immediately. Well, that's not what you get with aviation investigations. The NTSB usually takes a year for the final report. Well, having said that, The National Transportation Safety Board does do briefings pretty quickly, and we're already getting a lot of information on all three of these accidents. So things start to emerge, and trend lines start to emerge, what we are not seeing is a connection between these three. So I think you know, one way to look at is to step back and say, everyone knows this is a statistic that practically everybody hears. I've heard it. I've said it myself. Many more people are going to die on highways than in our planes this year in the United States, if you suddenly heard in a month's time of three different friends who were killed in car accidents, one in Alaska, one in Washington, DC, and one in Canada. I don't know that you would suddenly say, is it safe to drive? You know, what's going on, right? It's just sort of assumed that there were different causes, right? Having said that, I do want to broaden the conversation to talk about some very serious threats that could affect this, but just, you know, to put a to put a cap on it. I'm glad you asked the question at this point, there are three different sets of circumstances with these three different airline accidents in three different places, and there is not a clear through line connecting it at this point.
Arjun Singh 6:16
Well, let's take sort of a longer view of aviation safety, the state of safety within the aviation sector right now. Have we been on a steady march, and I'll use, you know, the last decade, or maybe the last two decades, it's kind of a starting point, just to have a starting point. Has the industry reformed and become safer over time, or are there areas where there has been a lot of call to reform safety, and what do those look like? I guess, to sum it all up, what is the state of safety within the aviation industry, and what are the things that someone like you is paying attention to and maybe would like to see reformed? Sure,
Bill McGee 6:55
that's an excellent question. And I think for me and for many others that have advocated in Washington, before Congress, before Congress, before the Department of Transportation, before the Federal Aviation Administration. In my case, for more than 20 years, there are some things that concern us, but let's be clear, it is an extremely safe form of transportation. In fact, commercial aviation, I want to, want to clarify. I'm talking about airlines. I'm not talking about small private aircraft, but commercial aviation is the safest form of transportation. That is a statistical fact, and it has gotten safer through the decades, just for some context, at peak times today, any given day in the United States, there could be 5400 aircraft in the sky that the US Air Traffic Control Network under the FAA, is overseeing every day. There's just short of 3 million passengers flying on airlines, about 2.9 million. That comes to like 10 million scheduled passenger flights every year. So we are talking huge numbers in which you may not be happy with the service, you may not be happy with the tight seats, you may not be happy with the air rage, with the fees for the bags, all of that stuff. But thankfully, you and your loved ones got where you were going, safe, safely. There's no question about that. And I, you know, I for one look, I'm extremely critical of the airlines. I'm extremely critical of the FAA. Over the years, I wrote a book called Attention all passengers, that called out all of these, all of these entities. But I, like like many others, I try to be fair, and it is an extremely safe system. Having said that there are areas of great concern, and some of them have just cropped up in the last month with the with the incoming Trump administration. So I want to talk about that a little more in depth. But I think you know, to start off the conversation, let's not scream that the sky is falling because it's an extremely safe system, and an awful lot of people work very hard on it, but one of the reasons that it's so safe is, unfortunately, there's an expression that's used in aviation where the regulations are written in blood, And by that we mean that we learn over time how to do things better. The engineering has gotten so much better. I'm not talking about the problems that we're seeing at Boeing right now, but I'm talking about big picture in aviation. Aircraft are built better. Look at what happened in Toronto, that airplane lost both wings and flipped over on its roof. There were flames, there was smoke, and I can guarantee you, if under similar circumstances that had happened 30 years ago, there would have been fatalities instead of everyone getting out alive. Why? A couple of things. One is human factors. We learn more about how to evacuate planes, and I am a huge proponent of giving a shout out to flight attendants. I think they're the most under sung of all airline employees. Yeah, those two flight attendants over the, over the, you know, over the weekend in Toronto, they did a fantastic job. They got everybody out alive. This is becoming the norm. It's not, it's not an anomaly. We have seen acts. Instead, no doubt, in the past, would have been fatal, not be fatal. The plane is burning to a crisp, and yet, everybody got out safely, having said that, please, folks, leave your damn laptops and phones behind. Okay? If it's not a human being or a pet, you're not carrying it when you go to go, yeah, there's video of the flight attendant saving lives the other day and having to waste time, and time is precious in a situation like that, saying put down your phones. Shouldn't have to say that.
Arjun Singh 10:33
After the break, Bill and I will talk about the recent moves the FAA coming from the Trump administration. We'll be right back. I
you know, there was last year right around this time, all the issues were happening with Boeing planes. And in the spirit of talking about different components and the nuances in there, I have just heard from a lot of people bringing that up again, you know, they're sort of saying, Well, you see these crashes. Remember last year, all the planes were going through malfunctions and whatnot. You know, now that we're about a year outside of a lot of those events bill, has there been an update after these incidents happened? Has Boeing shaped up? Was there more oversight of them? Did Boeing change anything with these planes? After all of these reports were coming out about malfunctioning parts on them,
Bill McGee 11:31
we still have a long way to go with Boeing. The fact is, the FAA still has a lot of work to do. The fact is, we need to step back as a nation, when there is an airline accident, we have zero tolerance in this country. You see it in the media. You see it in Congress. And folks in Congress like to stand up and say, we have the safest system in the world. Well, do we? The fact is, for more than four decades, since the Reagan administration, we're talking about the 1980s the FAA has been understaffed. What do I mean by understaffed? I'm talking about critical life and death work. I'm talking about air traffic controllers, which we all know that is critical work. And then there's behind the scenes, the you know, the folks that most passengers never see, and that is FAA safety inspectors. Well, they're the they're the people that need to go out and ensure that Boeing is doing its job. The airlines are doing their job. The maintenance of US airlines is being done properly. And I've written about all this. I've advocated about all this. The fact is, we've had a crisis for years. And you know, there is this thing that is said in Washington, at the FAA, by sort of lower level folks at the FAA and by others. Sometimes it's said in whispers, the FAA is called the tombstone agency. That's a nickname that they earn, because very often they respond only after something happens, after there's been a fatality, after there's been a tragedy of some kind, right? Well, I'm also fair to the FAA, the fact is, they don't have the resources. So let's take it piece by piece. Let's start with Boeing. There was a time where, where FAA had inspectors that, you know, stood over Boeing shoulder and said, Okay, what are you doing there? How's you know, how are you doing that? And how is the work being done at their manufacturing facilities, engineering, all of it? Well, they don't have the resources, because we've been understaffed for 40 years, and because of that, the FAA simply doesn't have the inspectors. So what did they do? They did the next best thing. They came up with something called ODA, which is basically they designate designees, our safety inspectors working on behalf of the FAA. But guess what? They work for the companies that they're inspecting. Now think about that a moment. Does that make any logical sense? So that's a system that does not work. So we need more FAA inspectors. Will it cost more? Yeah, but it's money well spent. It's not money being thrown around all of this talk of Doge and all of this talk of clearing out waste. Well, this is not waste. This is the opposite of waste. It's wasteful to not spend this money because then we pay for it anyway when we have these tragedies like we've seen with the Boeing 737, Max crashes a few years ago. So there's that. And then there's the fact that the airlines in the US, every single airline, without exception, I wrote about this at length in my book, Attention all passengers. The airlines outsource what the industry calls heavy maintenance. That is the the periodic checks that need to be done after a certain number of hours in flight, C checks, D checks. This is serious work, and we outsource it to El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico, China, Singapore. Now, it's one thing for the airlines to want to do that, but it's another thing for the FAA to allow it, and the FAA has allowed it for decades now. But most of all, it's a safety issue. So we have so much to do here, and yet we seem, in the last month or so to be going in the wrong direction with this administration. Where has this administration come down on aviation safety and the FAA? Well, first, this absolutely nonsensical issue. Dei. Now, what is dei designed to do? It's designed to from blamed for the crash, right? Exactly. I mean, that was just unforgivable. In my view. It was just absolutely unforgivable. Let's be very blunt. They hadn't even recovered the bodies from that crash. It was less than 24 hours later, okay, in the Potomac River, and already these charges, false charges, unfounded charges, were being made straight from the White House itself. And then what did we just see last weekend? We saw again, through because of Elon Musk and this, this effort to root out waste, we saw the firing on Friday night of 17 150 FAA employees, 1750
Arjun Singh 15:44
now I want to ask you real quick about that bill. Because, you know, I do you know people who are still in the FAA and the air traffic control, because you you referring to it and saying that it's referred to as the tombstone agency, like that really struck a chord with me, that the gravity of the job these guys have to do. They're also being consistently attacked by, you know, the President, by his allies and whatnot. Do you have a sense of sort of the the mood, and what does this do to the air traffic controllers? I can't imagine that. It's a uplifting, happy environment to go into when you do have these crashes take place, I'm sure it's awful when it happens under your watch. And then you have the president and the the advisor, Shadow president, also maligning you for, you know, a lot of stuff that doesn't seem to actually address the issues. But have you talked to people within the FAA or air traffic control, people in the industry? How do they feel about this stuff right now?
Bill McGee 16:41
They're enraged. I can tell you, I have, I have many, many friends and contacts within the FAA. And I'm not talking about in the Washington level. I'm not talking about political appointees. I'm talking about people in the front lines doing the work, inspectors. Some of them have whistleblowers. Some of them, you know, trusted me when I was working on my book to share their stories, because they they came out and became public whistleblowers. And I still, I come from an airline family. I have so many friends that are still in the airlines. I talk to folks in the industry all the time. And then, you know, still involved with Civil Air Patrol, still involved with one college. So I talked to, not to Talking Heads, not to, you know, communications folks at the agencies in Washington took the people that are actually doing the jobs in the last couple of weeks. They are incensed. Think about it. You just had almost 2000 employees fired on a Friday night for no reason whatsoever. The quote from the White House and from Elon Musk was that they were quote, unquote, probationary employees. Now, first of all, so what? What if they were that's not saving money. You don't save money by making air safety less safe in the end, aside from the awful human cost, you're actually making it more expensive in dollars and cents too. How much has it cost the government to clean up the mess from Boeing and from all these other tragedies that we've seen. Now the fact is that laying off employees at the FAA at a time when they are already stretched thin, it makes no sense in any way possible. Almost 2000 employees were laid off last week. Now what? Is the mood with those that weren't they're in shock. Think about it. First of all, if you're someone who is a person of color, if you're a woman, if you're LGBTQ, whatever it is, if you fall under that dei umbrella, or the perception of that umbrella, now you're already on the defensive, because everybody from the President on down in this administration is blaming you for things that you and your colleagues never did, but so that is already a stressor that folks up in air traffic control towers do not need. Okay, again, there's no proof to back any of this up. It's all fighting with phantoms and ghosts. Then you have these layoffs. So now, whether you're a a newbie who is, you know, just come in, or that term probationary that Elon Musk used, well, guess what? It also included some employees who were there 1020, years. Why? Because, under FAA guidelines, if you're working at a job for 10 years and then suddenly you apply for a job in a different department or a different different function. Guess what? They call you probationary. You're not new, you're not in off the street. A month ago, you've been at the FAA for 15 years, and now you're working in a new position, and you're in training. So they're calling you a probationary and now you just got laid off. Okay, does that make any sense in the world. How is any of this helping safety and how is any of this rooting out waste? Look, I am the first to say it seems like there's an awful lot of waste in the government. Let's start at the Pentagon, for example, but to start at the FAA, it makes no sense, and that's what I'm talking about when I say you. Is the system safe? Yes, will it continue to be safe? These are direct threats to safety. Well. Bill
Arjun Singh 20:05
McGee, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It was a pleasure, and thank you for sharing the knowledge. Absolutely, it's
Bill McGee 20:11
always good to talk to you, and anytime I'm happy to do it again, I appreciate thanks
Arjun Singh 20:21
for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh, with help from Ariella Markowitz and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton, our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell.
Unknown Speaker 20:33
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