FAAck you, peasant. Best I can tell, the disaster started early last week, grew much worse Thursday, and rapidly accelerated early Friday, at which point the Mid-Atlantic airports collapsed into chaos — an infrastructural disaster that extended through the weekend, was then exacerbated by storms across the country, and somehow never cracked the news. I wouldn’t know about it myself had so many people close to me not been traveling, and were I not that annoying person in every friend group who lives on the internet, and is therefore bombarded with questions whenever something strange is happening. “Michael, pull it up,” my mom has said to me for several decades. But beyond corroborating the fact that something had indeed gone catastrophically wrong after skimming a handful of flight trackers, I had nothing to report. Not even our citizen journalists were on the case, a silence that became, for me, the most unnerving aspect of the weekend, as broad public disinterest in the story wildly contrasted with what I heard from the ground.

Friday morning, a friend of mine successfully took off on a flight from Miami to Newark after a miserable three-hour delay, and whatever. We expect this now. But then his plane was instructed to circle Washington for two hours — with “fifty other planes in a similar position,” his pilot informed the cabin — before finally diverting to Reagan Airport, three hours south of New York City by train. From there, flights to the city were unavailable. Meanwhile, another friend of mine was stranded in Nashville after his flight to the city was cancelled. With no reliable flight back for days, and no hotels available, he rented a car (one of the last remaining) and drove. “I’ve been waiting here for six hours,” my mom texted Friday night. She was leaving Tampa for Atlantic City after visiting my sister. It was already 11PM, and there were no available flights home for six days (partially, I concede, this is on her for flying Spirit).

According to flight trackers, there were around 1,500 cancellations by Friday evening, and over 10,000 delays. I checked the New York Times, Drudge, FOX. Nothing.

Partly, bad weather across the country made for helpful cover for the airlines. By the time I tweeted about it, delays had been cascading for 24 hours, and I wondered if responsibility lay with the FAA or the Port Authority. Neither, I was told. It was 2PM. A lightning storm had just arrived at Newark, and delays were only a matter of bad weather. Indeed, this was the excuse many were given by the airlines, which aren’t required to reimburse passengers over weather-related issues. But winds at that time were between 5 and 10 mph. The storm lasted maybe 30 minutes. Is a brief bit of lightning at Newark really enough to take out the entire Mid-Atlantic… starting on Thursday? Out west, a deadly storm system followed later that day, which soon eclipsed the disaster cascading out of Jersey — but what was going on at Newark, which had clearly, by Friday morning, impacted the entire Mid-Atlantic?

Newark has three major runways. One has been under construction since mid-April, and will be under construction at least through mid-June (friend, please, I am begging you, never fly through this airport unless you have to fly through this airport). But according to a pilot grounded late last week for hours, the airport was down to one runway by Friday morning. The reason, presumably, is a protracted, potentially deadly labor shortage. Which — and look, I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but — is starting to seem a little artificial.

A day before the regional paralysis, the New York Times broke a story on a national air traffic control staffing crisis. High-level: almost every airport in the country is understaffed, the New York City airports are among the worst, it takes two to four years to train new air traffic controllers, and they are certified per facility, which means controllers can’t be sent to crucially understaffed airports to cover regional disruptions. This would seem a likely culprit for the Mid-Atlantic paralysis even had there not been weeks of reporting on Newark’s many failures leading up to the weekend. But of course there had been weeks of reporting on Newark’s many failures leading up to the weekend.

Not only was Newark Airport’s air traffic control grossly understaffed, but in the wake of Washington D.C.’s recent deadly crash, itself apparently due in part to understaffed air traffic control, several high-profile technology failures (a brief radio blackout, multiple radar blackouts), and at least one near miss were considered so traumatic staff walked off the job. Or, according to United’s CEO.

One air traffic controller, who is himself on “trauma leave,” denied the “walk off” with no apparent sense of self-awareness. Thursday, just hours before the regional failure, the Wall Street Journal altered my reality with a profile on the guy. He had just narrowly averted a mid-air collision. A whistleblower, if you will, with “PTSD,” he claims. And first thing’s first, no, I did not realize air traffic controllers dressed like this:

But then I also didn’t know they were fucking loaded. Between sips of Johnny Walker Blue, Jonathan Stewart explained that he was making $450,000 a year (after overtime), and was looking to maintain that salary while working fewer hours.

Air traffic controllers are federal workers, employed by the FAA. While this was not something I knew before last week, I began to suspect it after I was — quite against my will — introduced to the phrase “trauma leave” in association with what I understand to be the actual job for which air traffic controllers are hired. They’re also unionized under the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), which means we are once again dealing with one group of government workers bargaining with a different group of government workers, the latter of which is not incentivized to ensure long-term stability or passenger safety, but temporary political victory. A red flag every time.

NATCA acknowledges there’s a staffing crisis, as it has for many years. And as the FAA has floated many potential and partial solutions — for example raising the age of retirement (presently 56 for these guys), and generally reducing training time — NATCA has expressed support conceptually, while pushing back specifically. The problem, the union argues, is safety. And that all seems fine enough. We love a safe plane ride. But as Johnny Walker Blue made clear, another concern (I’m sure it’s just an afterthought) is increasing staff while maintaining his salary of close to half a million dollars a year.

Now, the union has not yet threatened to strike. Though probably this has something to do with the fact that striking is illegal for federal workers, and the last time air traffic controllers did so, back in 1981, they all lost their jobs. Then Ronald Reagan banned them from federal work for life (based), only for Bill Clinton to free them back into the system to sow discord and rot in 1993 (not based). In this context, the United CEO’s position that many air traffic controllers “walked off” (not a strike!), and Johnny Walker Blue’s firm pushback against this charge starts to make sense. The union wants more budget for the FAA, more staff, more time off, and more pay (per hour). They have been asking for many years, and their requests have been ignored. Is this possibly a quiet strike? Is this a little rattling of the union saber, well within its legal bounds, with “trauma leave” the chosen verbiage, tactical leaks (“Newark is not safe”), and whistleblower profiles in the Wall Street Journal?

A very mild strike? Just a little strike, for a treat?

I certainly believe there’s at least a bit of union fuckery afoot. Nonetheless, much of NATCA’s diagnosis of the problem facing our airports, which its president shared with Congress back in March, rings true: not enough people working, rotting infrastructure built in the 60s, faulty tech. In tandem, errors are proliferating, and they’re getting worse. In January 2023, when the FAA’s NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system crashed, it triggered the first nationwide ground stop since 9/11. In July 2024, a global IT disruption caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update froze systems across industries, including airlines. While flight safety has technically improved from the 1970s and 1980s (for now), the trendline for flight reliability, once discounted for weather, is negative. A major shutdown will happen again. I would not be surprised if it happened this year.

Air travel is already unreliable to the point nobody is surprised enough by a regional paralysis to even cover it. With much of what is needed to fix these problems tied up in bureaucratic limbo, there is a chance nothing improves. There is a chance this will all just… get worse. Which we have to face. We have to look at the slow decay of our country, built by men who are no longer alive, and acknowledge what is happening.

Last week, I found it grimly ironic when the American press and internet went to total culture war over the question of whether white South Africans, then arriving here by plane, deserved refugee status. Racism against white people in that country is not only legal but systemic, and popular black South African politicians have repeatedly threatened genocide. Still, “They can go to where their native land is,” one CNN panelist argued. “Which is probably Germany, or Holland.”

Okay, listen, I’d love to jump right in. I’d love to expand on my initial reaction, which was just some version of hello, this crazy woman is making an argument for the genocide of an ethnic group that arrived in South Africa close to 500 years ago on live national television, which can obviously be used against every immigrant in every country in the world who migrated basically yesterday. But there is a more important story here, which is that the once great nation from which these refugees are arriving has decayed into near oblivion over just the last three decades.

Let’s table the horrifying violence for a moment. South Africa’s infrastructural decay is almost unbelievable: deterioration of water treatment, the failure of power plants, and the decimation (I mean this in the technical sense) of public transportation. Since the 1990s, most major long-distance rail routes have been suspended, while the use of commuter rail has plummeted by something like 90 percent. Today, roving gangs pick apart the train tracks for scrap metal. A country can just decay, before our eyes, and collapse. This should be our takeaway.

While Mexico’s socialist president argues our government should not mistreat her citizens living here illegally and sending all the money they earn back to Mexico, it occurs to me there have always been barbarians and parasites threatening civilization. History is clear on this point. This is how Rome fell, a fact so often discussed in spooky foreboding tones I risk cliche in even mentioning the fact, and yet somehow the history is barely considered. It’s like, yes this happened in some faraway cartoon land, but it will never happen to us. These days, I wonder if the Romans also moralized in favor of the parasites and barbarians. Is suicidal ideation something innate to western culture? To every mature culture? I don’t know. I do however know that we are suicidal, and I don’t want to die.

Air travel directly contributes $1.25 trillion in annual economic activity, and directly supports over 10 million jobs. From impact on business, including global business, tourism, and the infrastructure that has sprung up to support travel (hotels, auto rentals, and drivers) the full benefit is many times greater. Much of modern business assumes reliable transport. What happens once nobody can trust this anymore? What do we no longer maintain? What do we no longer build? The miracle of flight is a man-made wonder, but the miracle of flight on a schedule is how modern civilization exists.

How much of Sub Saharan Africa’s inability to progress comes down to a fundamental lack of infrastructural reliability? What about South Asia, or South America? It’s hard to know what comes first, a region sucking or its failure to build and maintain the technology that feeds, shelters, and moves around its people. What’s clear is these things are linked, the abstract “sucking” and the ability to do shit that keeps a lot of people alive and thriving. And we are getting worse at the latter.

America is not in danger of South African refugees, America is in danger of becoming South Africa.

I don’t believe our air decay will conclude in some grand, shocking catastrophe, but in a way that’s sort of to our detriment. On our present course, things will decay so gradually we’ll probably not realize, or care. Weekends without air travel will become a thing that sometimes happens, and stories about weekend air travel paralysis will no longer be written. Experts will tell us it was always this way, if you look at the data from this or that angle, in this or that light, just as major power blackouts have been normalized. Just as our rotted New York City buildings and landmarks were always, I’m told, converted to housing for criminals and covered in graffiti. Just as crime in every major city, and drug addiction, and public defecation was always this rampant, if you really think about it, as it was probably always hidden in the past, or there was no internet to cover it. Or something. Or whatever. There will be excuses so numerous you’ll learn not to listen. And you will still not have reliable air travel.

Be grateful for this little bit of tedious coverage, I guess. For now, at least, it means we’re still alive.

—SOLANA