The US flight saga looked like a clown show. Can they be the adults in the room?

详细摘要

A missing president, a dodgy microphone and misplaced hubris: the weekend’s airspace shutdown was not just a technical mishap, but a communication failure. Fixing the system now stands as a test for both sides of politics.

Washington: One of the first stories I covered after Donald Trump’s inauguration was the devastating crash of American Airlines Flight 5342, which collided with a Black Hawk army helicopter on approach to Washington’s city airport. All 67 people on both aircraft died.

While bodies and debris were still being pulled from the water, Trump called a news conference and speculated without evidence that diversity, equity and inclusion policies could be to blame. It was premature, reckless, insensitive and wrong.

The president took an entirely different approach to the nationwide ground stop that halted air traffic across the US on Friday and is still playing out with delays and cancellations 48 hours later.

He did not say anything publicly throughout the crisis, instead posting about the boat crash in New Orleans, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and, most of all, about the redevelopment of a Washington golf course.

It was only on Sunday morning (US time) that Trump commented on the airspace incident, writing on Truth Social that Congress must approve “desperately needed” funding to build a new air traffic control system.

As the crisis unfolded, the president had his inexperienced homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, in front of the cameras explaining that “this is not another 9/11”, and scolding reporters for not adopting Trump’s rebranding of AI (“We call it SI, remember,” he told a journalist).

Later, when Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared in the White House briefing room for a news conference on which millions of Americans and others were hanging, it felt as though their main mission was to praise Trump and demand money from Congress.

“This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like,” Mullin said. “We’re built to handle crises like this.” Would that it were true.

It took more than five minutes to get to the actual nub of what happened – a router that was playing up and giving inconsistent data, leading technicians to shut down the…

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