I know they can’t strike but everyone in TSA and Traffic Controllers should walk out. OK, they get fired, where are their replacements?
Signed, an angry US citizen
The predictable result of a potential air disaster will be Trump rage-Tweet blaming the Democrats and showing little if any sympathy for the victims. I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Yes, of course it is. By design. Just one more reason for Republican’ts to justify privatizing the system and selling if off on the cheap to some well-connected billionaire…
In other transportation, influencing govenment and love of money news
They’re being trained right now in Tennessee and based on the one PR picture I saw, they’re Caucasian.
Al Queda once disrupted our entire aviation system because they hated America causing economic losses into the billions. Remind me why Trump is doing it. Hey…at least I didn’t go full Godwin…
And this is where the heads of the major US airlines need to get in Trump’s face and say we’re not sacrificing our safety records because of your temper tantrums. We’re shutting down until this is over. Period.
I’ve been Little Miss Grumbly McGrumble of late as I have no fun travel adventures until later in the year and I didn’t have enough of them last year.
I am now Little Miss Gratefully McGrateful.
Weird times.
Because privatization and cost-cutting pressures are so helpful to air safety.
It would probably end the shutdown if a group of traffic controllers at one of the key airports all didn’t go to work for one shift. Rerouting around all of that would totally screw up the system for a day, and make the point pretty well. It’s better than the alternative, where one of these overworked, unpaid controllers makes a mistake and a plane crashes…we’ve had a very safe air system for a decade now, and we’re going to throw it away over a temper tantrum.
That’s what they thought in 1981. “We go on strike, and we’ll just shut down air transport. What can they do?” This is what they did:
On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order,[8][9] and banned them from federal service for life. In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired, a hard problem to fix as, at the time, it took three years in normal conditions to train a new controller.[2] They were replaced initially with non-participating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non-rated personnel, and in some cases by controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. Some military controllers were also used until replacements could be trained.
They don’t have to go a full all out strike, just refuse to allow departures for one hour every day. That should get Delta (GA), American and Southwest(TX) on the phone with their senators .
No. They need to get in McConnell’s face.
Are you going to Grouse Land? The Curmudgeon’s Theme Park? Knott’s Very Happy Farm?
All they have to do is work to rule and enforce the conservative versions of the time and distance margins in the book. For decades they’ve approved course changes based on where they know planes are going to be when the changes take effect, but that always has an element of optimism in it. They could just be a little pessimistic and the system would gridlock.
The TSA is an enormously bloated, ineffectual excuse of an agency. It does incredibly stupid things that prove what a charade it all is. One of the best examples is the accumulation of presumably “dangerous” liquids in huge trash cans right where passengers queue for security. These allegedly dangerous explosive liquids are concentrated in huge cans which, of course, magnifies the danger exponentially. All that horrific, dangerous liquid piled high right among passengers. It’s nothing but theater and drama to justify the TSA’s existence. Just train airline personnel like the old days; they screened as well or better than the clowns who x-ray us and fondle our naughty bits.
You’ve made the mistake of confusing ideology with the real world…
When ideology hits an aircraft headed the other way, things get real in a hurry.
No, ideology sees that as a opportunity to sell collision-avoidance technology. Or passenger crash vests made out of bubble wrap. Didn’t you hear the story about how Purdue Pharmaceuticals single handedly created the opioid crisis, and now has a drug pending approval with the FDA that purports to cure people of opioid addiction, which they plan to sell at ridiculously inflated prices? Did you also happen to catch how they don’t give a flying monkey shite about how many lives they’ve destroyed in the process?