‘the Alarm Bells Are Going Off’: Air Travel Hits New Lows

A few weeks before his second term began, President Donald Trump promised a “golden age of travel.”

More than a year later, however, it is far from that.

This week’s deadly crash in New York and the eye-popping lines at airport security checkpoints are the latest in a series of failures plaguing aviation. Other woes include worries of near collisions and equipment failures that have exposed a buckling system — one that has been under strain for years.

Even investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board en route to LaGuardia Airport to investigate the crash there were not immune to the chaos: One specialist was stuck in an hourslong Transportation Security Administration line in Houston, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said this week.

Taken together, little about the current moment suggests the “golden age” has arrived.

"If you're in Houston, and you're standing in a four-hour line, it doesn't really feel ‘golden’ at the moment,” said an aviation industry official, granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing issues candidly.

Erik Hansen, the U.S. Travel Association’s senior vice president of government relations, said the government gridlock doesn’t discriminate between domestic or international passengers because “what they're seeing is chaos, and what they're seeing is a system that doesn't work.”

“The alarm bells are going off,” Hansen told POLITICO. “We're going to be in damage control before we can start being back in the mode where we're improving the system again.”

Those alarms are ringing all over.

Struggling to get to ‘normal order’

Air traffic controllers continue to be in short supply, and those on the job are overworked. A commercial and cargo jet narrowly avoided each other last week as they came in to land at Newark Liberty International Airport, making headlines days before two pilots died in Sunday night’s fatal crash between a fire truck and a landing passenger jet at LaGuardia. And in separate incidents this month, equipment malfunctions at Newark and at a regional air traffic facility for Washington-area airports triggered control tower evacuations and hourslong ground stops.

The TSA’s acting chief, who spent the day Wednesday telling lawmakers her agency is facing a dire situation amid the nearly six-week-long partial government shutdown, couldn’t muster up much optimism on the immediate travel outlook.

“I look forward to getting to normal order so that we can achieve the vision of President Trump,” Ha Nguyen McNeill told reporters Wednesday.

There could be some hope for TSA. The Trump administration said Friday that TSA screeners who have been working without pay should start receiving paychecks again as soon as Monday, as Congress continues to wrangle over Department of Homeland Security funding.

The "vision" McNeill was talking about has been echoed by Trump’s Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who has leaned into Trump’s rhetoric, urging travelers to “dress with respect” before going to the airport and to behave with more decorum on planes. He has frequently hearkened back to a seemingly more glamorous era of air travel of decades past — even though safety incidents and deadly crashes were far more common back then. At the same time, his agency has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of the aging air traffic control system, with a $12.5 billion “down payment” for the effort, as officials seek roughly $19 billion more — though the effort remains in its nascent stages.

Duffy nonetheless has touted the Trump administration’s efforts as critical steps toward easing delays and preparing the system for rising air travel demand.

“We are moving at the ‘speed of Trump’ because the Americans deserve a seamless travel experience and the safest skies in the world,” Duffy wrote this month in an opinion piece for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

DOT did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats are eager to blame Republicans for the mess — and Republicans are just as quick to return the fire.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee’s aviation panel, said Democrats have proposed solutions to reopen TSA numerous times, calling it “sad” that Republicans have torpedoed efforts like her own. She said news reports about long TSA lines and this week’s deadly collision will likely prompt many would-be passengers to decide that “they're probably going to cancel their vacation.”

She added that with a controller workforce stretched thin — made thinner by the administration’s axing of crucial support staff during the Department of Government Efficiency’s spending cuts — has only added to the longstanding issues. “So there's a lot of work that can be done, and it needs to be done because we're only going to see more of these runway incursions resulting in fatalities and injuries.”

Republicans point the finger back at Democrats.

“The Democrats are causing chaos across the country with their unprecedented obstructions,” said Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told POLITICO. Commerce member Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said Democrats “care more about illegal immigrants than Americans,” who he contended are being held hostage amid the travel chaos.

Democrats’ “extreme open border advocacy is causing them to inflict enormous harm on the flying public,” Cruz said Wednesday.

Finger-pointing aside, U.S. Travel’s Hansen said the failure is bipartisan. The current spending impasse is already the third shutdown of DHS since Oct. 1.

“They’re the part of the government that's been doing the most damage. These government shutdowns have cost the industry billions of dollars,” he said. “I can't say everyone has a perfect track record, but really, I think a lot of the problems have originated in Congress.”

Hope for a stressed system?

Despite all the ills plaguing the aviation industry for now, the demand to fly remains high: Across the country, thousands of travelers have been stuck in airport lines — some for four hours or more — while TSA staffing gaps, driven by sick calls and ongoing attrition due to the nearly six-week long DHS shutdown, slow the path to their travel destinations.

Moreover, ticket prices are rising and flights are being cut as the war in Iran drives up oil and jet fuel costs.

The industry official said that while the near-term situation remains bleak, the upcoming air traffic control modernization will eventually bring long-overdue improvements to the system — the first real effort in recent memory.

“Having been around for multiple decades in this space, there's been more activity about air traffic control modernization in the past year than there has been probably in the past two decades,” the official said. “And I think these disruptions — not making light of them at all, they're huge and very, very painful — but they're temporary."

On Thursday, two House committees advanced an air safety bill, the ALERT Act, aimed at addressing some of the issues raised in the crash last year outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Others argue the problems run deeper than short-term disruptions. The recent failures have exposed a system increasingly overrun by rising demand: more planes in the sky, more routes to manage and more passengers than it is equipped to handle, said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant who was a longtime official at both the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The growth of air traffic control, modernization and staffing is not commensurate with the growth of commercial aviation traffic,” Guzzetti said.

The system that keeps planes moving safely relies on aging infrastructure and operates with too few controllers, who are often unequipped with the technologies needed to safely and efficiently manage growing air traffic demands — two long-standing weaknesses that were exposed in the midair collision in January 2025 that killed 67 people outside Reagan National. Such issues appear to be surfacing again in the latest crash at LaGuardia.

While fatal crashes are still rare, “major airline crashes are beginning to occur, and it seems like a recent trend,” Guzzetti said. Before that crash between a passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter last year, fatalities in the U.S. were almost nonexistent, with a total of only three people dying in airline accidents in the U.S. from 2015 through 2024.

And before the LaGuardia incident, there had been a drop in near-collisions on runways. In 2023, runway incursions had spiked to a whopping 11 incursions — more than double the previous year — amid a post-pandemic surge in air traffic. The FAA by comparison logged only four serious incursions involving at least one commercial aircraft last year, and one serious and one near-catastrophic event in 2024, according to a review of the agency’s data.

The FAA is still investigating some reported incidents this year, including the event last week at Newark. In a statement to POLITICO, the agency said that runway incidents were down 8 percent in 2025, though the agency counts general aviation — charter and private flights, for example — in that statistic. A spokesperson said the decline was "a direct result of outreach and different surface safety technologies going in at airports all over the country."

The FAA also recently mandated a change requiring pilots and controllers to rely on onboard equipment in increasingly crowded airspace, rather than visual observation alone. The move, FAA said, was prompted by two near midair collisions near airports this year. Just this week, the agency said it was investigating a Black Hawk helicopter crossing paths with a United Airlines flight on approach to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California — it and said it would determine whether the new mandate was applied in this case.

“It's still a bit disturbing. … But I still don't think the sky is falling,” Guzzetti said.

“The air traffic system is definitely stressed. It's always been stressed, and it's difficult for the bureaucracy to quickly modernize a system as complex as our air traffic system. I don't think this is going to change overnight,” he said.