Airline Crashes: Can the Cheap Tears and Identify the Causes
The Mind-Numbing Media Gives Us Sob-Sister Journalism and Ignores Corporate America’s Evisceration of Safety Regulations
By
David Gottfried
To adequately discuss the airline crash that recently transpired in Washington, D.C., I need to go back to 1980, the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, and the election of Ronald Reagan. I know some people think history is boring and irrelevant, but one cannot respond to Event A unless one knows what triggered Event A. (I am not an absurdist; I believe most things have causes and that worthwhile analysis requires that investigators identify culprits.)
The Social and Political Changes which have been Endangering Civilian Aviation Since 1980
In 1980, the prevailing and ascendant conventional wisdom (John Kenneth Galbraith, in “The Affluent Society” (1957), called the conventional wisdom the platitudinous blather that most people cherish as gospel truth) held that unions and liberalism had made workers slovenly slobs who needed the crack of a whip, that blacks and Latinos were more often than not nothing but irresponsible welfare queens and thugs, and that liberal Democrats and intellectuals were pussy-footed faggots who required a swift kick in the ass.
Indeed, I remember reading an Op Ed article in the NY Times, in 1980, from an autoworker who said that he had a very comfortable life, all the creature comforts any acquisitive American could want – and that he felt guilty. He questioned the justice of an economy that let himself, a man without college and without highly advanced technical skills, live in middle class luxury.
Americans started to sound like sexual masochists searching for a Margaret Thatcher dominatrix to beat them. (A few years later, in around 1994, Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote a book about “Victorian Values.” In a word, she thought fear of fire and brimstone was just what the doctor ordered and said that people needed to feel more guilty.) Likewise, in the Fall of 1981, Susan Sontag, who had once been a radical who had claimed that the white race was “the cancer of human history” said, in New York’s Townhall, that the era of social activism was over and that people should “just do their work.”
People complied with the commands of High Priestess Sontag. New Yorkers became a bunch of preppy nerds dedicated to making their millionaire bosses billionaires, and by 1990, NY became an open-air clinic for the dead and dying in which the incidence of homelessness and AIDS had soared like helium.
In 1980, the air traffic controllers supported Ronald Reagan over Carter in the presidential race. This news was highly surprising because labor unions, for the most part, and especially in those days, stayed away from the Republican Party like someone with immune deficiency disease would avoid Covid hot spots.
Not long after Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, the air traffic controllers went on strike. Perhaps they thought Reagan would go easy on them because they had endorsed Reagan.
They were dead wrong.
Reagan made life miserable for them. Airline travel, for both workers and customers, no longer made us feel lofty, up in the gorgeous clouds, but more like doctors performing colonoscopies because everything related to airline travel seemed to reek of shit.
Today airline travel is a maddening chore; it formerly was a luxurious accompaniment to a lovely holiday in London or California. In days of yore, the seats were spacious, and the food was lavish. ‘
More importantly, air traffic controllers learned to lead a very different sort of life. In the glorious post war era of seemingly unceasing economic expansion, air traffic controllers, being among the most highly skilled union workers, were highly compensated and were given ample time to safely guide planes along their proper routes. After 1980, their pay, relative to the pay of other workers, has been steadily whittled away. More alarmingly, they are understaffed and are working longer hours.
The Current Status of Airline Traffic Control
The New York Times reported, on January 30, 2025, the following with respect to the recent crash:
a) Air Traffic controllers are working longer hours and at Reagan International Airport, at present, they generally work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week (I just read this in the Times; this is not leftist hyperbole)
b) At Reagan Int. airport, traffic controllers are understaffed by about one-third.
c) At the time of the crash, one man was doing the work of two men; he was sheparding planes into and out of the airport, but he was also directing helicopters through the airport. The Times said this required two different employees.
d) In 2024, various airlines wanted to send more planes into Reagan International Airport. Safety experts said that no additional planes or flights should burden that airport unless and until the airport was enriched with more facilities, equipment and labor. Of course, the airlines wanted to be cheap about things. (That’s a central tenet of the Republican religion). Senator Keane (who was Hillary’s running mate) said, in 2024, that if we burden that airport with additional flights, without additional resources to manage those flights, an accident might happen. (But of course the men in charge didn’t listen to Senator Keane because they probably thought he was just a coward – after all, since he was Hillary’s running mate, they probably thought he wore pink panties).
The result: Keane’s position, that there should be no additional flights without additional resources, was rejected. The airport was burdened with additional flights. And an accident, as Keane had warned, has taken place.
Middle America – Media-Rich and Information-Starved
The preceding is what I learned from the New York Times.
But 99 percent of America never reads the Times.
And what did American middle-class peasants hear from the goddamn mentally disabling idiot box ?
They heard cooing words of sorrow. They heard weeping wilting women (of both sexes) ready to collapse on fainting couches. They heard the word “tragedy” repeated ad nauseum. They heard bad actors trying to affect an air of compassion to make their miserable TV or radio station look good.
And they were starved of any information which might help us avoid future accidents.
And it is this sort of mentally disabling media coverage which made the American people dumb enough to vote for Trump. (Trump owes CNN, that phony liberal abomination, a lot of money)