The air accident that claimed the lives of 67 people in Washington on Wednesday night (early Thursday in Spain) has suddenly called into question Donald Trump's plans to drastically reduce the staff employed by the United States Public Administration. While details about the tragedy are still emerging and it is not yet possible to know exactly what happened, some things are clear.
The most obvious is that the control tower at Reagan National Airport was understaffed. At the time of the accident, at 8:20 p.m., there was only one controller in the tower, coordinating air and helicopter traffic, when under normal circumstances at that time there are four. The reduction in staff was decided by the facility supervisor. Normally, the number of controllers is reduced from four to two starting at 9:30 p.m. when air traffic begins to decrease, as the airport is closed from midnight to 6 a.m. due to its proximity to a densely populated area.
On Wednesday, for reasons that have not been made public, the control tower supervisor decided to advance the shift change. Later, that same person authorized one of the two controllers on duty to leave their post. This left only one controller in charge of an airport that, like many others in the United States, serves both civilian and military purposes and has around a hundred helicopters flying around its vicinity every day. Today, Friday, airport authorities have decided to indefinitely close the airspace around the airport to military helicopters, which mainly come from the dozen military bases of the four branches of the United States Army (Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Army).
In fact, the emerging details about the accident are becoming less reassuring for users of the national airport in the U.S. capital, which is a favorite for many Washington residents, at least for domestic flights, as it is located at the city's doorstep. On Tuesday, just one day before the disaster, a Republic Airways plane had to make a sharp turn and deviate from its route to avoid colliding with another helicopter as it was about to land.
Meanwhile, the plane's black boxes have been recovered and are being examined. So far, the helicopter's black boxes have not been located. U.S. President Donald Trump has stated that the army helicopter Black Hawk, which the American Eagle Bombardier CRJ700 -the short-haul flight division of American Airlines, the world's largest airline with 960 aircraft- collided with, was flying too high, although civil aviation authorities have not commented on the news. Currently, about 40 bodies have been recovered.
Indeed, according to experts, the U.S. lacks air traffic controllers. The Washington accident is just the latest in a series of incidents that have nearly caused tragedies in recent years. In just the first three months of 2023, there were three instances where two planes were on the verge of colliding. In one of them, in February of that year, a FedEx Boeing 767 and a Southwest passenger 737 came within thirty meters of each other at Austin's airport in Texas. In January, two Boeing 737s - one from Delta and the other from American - were on the brink of colliding at JFK Airport in New York, the country's sixth busiest for passengers and the busiest for international flights. The worst air disaster in history occurred when two planes collided during takeoff at Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife in 1978, resulting in 583 deaths.
Air traffic control problems go beyond staffing and include outdated technology and lack of financial resources. In recent years, their tasks have been complicated by the increase in air traffic and private space travel, as rockets must be tracked by controllers to avoid collisions with planes during takeoff and landing. Space companies are exempt from the tax airlines pay to fund this service.
This situation has been seized upon by Trump's critics to question his plans for massive cuts to the Public Administration, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees air traffic. As part of his strategy to control the U.S. state apparatus, Trump dismissed FAA Director Michael Whitaker last week and has frozen new hires.