Just weeks before his second term began, President Donald Trump promised a “golden age of travel.”
However, even after more than a year, it is far from that.
The deadly crash in New York this week and the eye-popping lines at airport security checkpoints are the latest in a series of failures to plague the aviation sector. Other crises include concerns about near collisions and equipment failures that have exposed a buckling system – which has been under stress for years.
Even National Transportation Safety Board investigators en route to LaGuardia Airport to investigate the crash were not immune to the chaos: NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said this week that an expert was stuck in a Transportation Security Administration line in Houston for up to an hour.
Overall, little information about the present moment suggests that a “Golden Age” has arrived.
“If you’re in Houston, and you’re standing in a four-hour line, it doesn’t really feel ‘golden’ right now,” said one aviation industry executive, granting anonymity to openly discuss ongoing issues.
Eric Hansen, senior vice president of government relations for the US Travel Association, said the government impasse does not discriminate between domestic or international travelers because “what they’re seeing is chaos, and what they’re seeing is a system that doesn’t work.”
“Alarm bells are ringing,” Hansen told Politico. “We’ll be in damage control before we get back into the mode where we’re repairing the system again.”
Those alarms are ringing everywhere.
Struggling to find ‘normal order’
Air traffic controllers are in increasingly short supply, and those on the job are being overworked. A commercial and cargo jet narrowly missed each other last week when they came in to land at Newark Liberty International Airport, just days before it was reported that two pilots were killed in a deadly crash between a fire truck and a landing passenger jet at LaGuardia Sunday night. And in separate incidents this month, equipment malfunctions at a regional air traffic facility in Newark and at a regional air traffic facility for Washington-area airports forced the evacuation of a control tower and grounding for hours.
The acting head of the TSA, who spent the day Wednesday telling lawmakers that his agency faces a dire situation amid a nearly six-week partial government shutdown, couldn’t muster much optimism on the immediate travel outlook.
“I’m eager to get to normalcy so we can achieve President Trump’s vision,” Ha Nguyen McNeil told reporters Wednesday.
There may be some hope for the TSA. The Trump administration said Friday that TSA screeners who have been working without pay should start receiving pay checks again as soon as Monday, as a tussle continues in Congress over Department of Homeland Security funding.
The “approach” McNeil was talking about has been echoed by Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, who has joined in on Trump’s rhetoric by urging travelers. “Dressing with respect” Behaving more decently before going to the airport and on planes. They often hear about the more glamorous era of air travel in past decades – even when there were safety incidents and fatal accidents. It was much more common at that time. At the same time, his agency has launched an ambitious overhaul of the aging air traffic control system with a $12.5 billion “down payment” for the effort, as officials want about $19 billion more — though the effort is still in its early stages.
Duffy nonetheless called the Trump administration’s efforts an important step toward reducing delays and preparing the system for growing air travel demand.
“We are moving at ‘Trump speed’ because Americans deserve a seamless travel experience and the safest skies in the world.” Duffy wrote In an opinion article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month.
DOT did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats are eager to blame Republicans for the mess — and Republicans are equally quick to return fire.
Sen tammy duckworth ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee’s aviation panel Torpedo attempts have been made Like his own. He said news reports about long TSA lines and this week’s fatal collision will likely lead many potential travelers to decide “they’re probably going to cancel their vacations.”
He said the administration’s removal of key support staff during government efficiency department spending cuts has reduced the comptroller workforce, exacerbating long-standing problems. “So there is a lot of work that can be done, and it needs to be done because we will only see more of these runway incursions resulting in deaths and injuries.”
Republicans point fingers at Democrats.
“Democrats are creating chaos across the country with their unprecedented obstruction,” the Senate Commerce Chairman said. ted cruz (R-Texas) told POLITICO. commerce member Eric Schmidt (R-Mo.) said Democrats “care more about illegal immigrants than they do about Americans,” arguing that they are being held hostage amid the travel chaos.
Cruz said Wednesday that Democrats’ “advocacy of extreme open borders is causing great harm to the flying public.”
Pointing the finger, US Travel’s Hansen said the failure is bipartisan. The current spending impasse is the third shutdown of DHS since October 1.
“They are the part of the government that is hurting the most. The industry has lost billions of dollars from these government shutdowns,” he said. “I can’t say everyone’s track record is perfect, but really, I think a lot of the problems have originated in Congress.”
Hope for a stressed system?
Despite all the problems plaguing the aviation industry right now, the demand to fly remains high: Across the country, thousands of travelers are stuck in airport lines — some for four hours or longer — while TSA staffing shortages, driven by sick calls and ongoing cuts caused by the nearly six-week-long DHS shutdown, slow down their path to travel destinations.
moreover, Ticket prices are rising and flights are being cut Since the cost of oil and jet fuel has increased due to the war in Iran.
Industry officials said that although the situation remains bleak in the near term, the upcoming air traffic control modernization will finally bring long-awaited improvements to the system – the first real effort in recent memory.
“Having been present in this field for several decades, there has been more activity regarding air traffic control modernization in the last year than in the previous two decades,” the official said. “And I think these disruptions — not light at all, they’re very large and very, very painful — but they are temporary.”
Two committees of the House on Thursday… put forward an air safety bill, warning actThe purpose of which was to address some of the issues raised in last year’s crash outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Others argue that the problems run deeper than short-term disruptions. Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti, a longtime official at both the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration, said the recent failures have exposed a system that is rapidly being overwhelmed by increasing demand: more planes in the sky, more routes to manage and more passengers than it is equipped to handle.
“The growth of air traffic control, modernization and staffing has not kept pace with the growth of commercial aviation traffic,” Guzzetti said.
The systems that keep planes safely running depend on aging infrastructure and operate with too few controllers, who are often not equipped with the technologies needed to safely and efficiently manage growing air traffic demands — two long-standing weaknesses that were exposed in a mid-air collision in January 2025 that killed 67 people outside Reagan National. Such issues appear to be coming to the fore again in the latest accident at LaGuardia.
While fatal accidents are still rare, “major airline accidents are starting to happen, and it seems like a recent trend,” Guzzetti said. Before last year’s crash between a passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, deaths in the US were almost non-existent, with only three people killed overall in airline crashes in the US from 2015 to 2024.
And prior to the LaGuardia incident, near-collision incidents on runways had declined. In 2023, amid a surge in air traffic following the pandemic, the number of runway incursions rose to 11 – more than double the previous year. By comparison, the FAA recorded only four serious intrusions last year, involving at least one commercial aircraft, and one serious and one catastrophic incident in 2024, according to a review of agency data.
The FAA is still investigating some incidents reported this year, including the incident in Newark last week. In a statement to Politico, the agency said runway incidents are expected to decline by 8 percent in 2025, although the agency counts general aviation — charter and private flights, for example — in that figure. A spokesperson said the decline is “a direct result of ongoing outreach and various surface security technologies at airports across the country.”
FAA Recently a change has also been mandated Increasingly congested airspace requires pilots and controllers to rely on onboard instruments rather than visual observation alone. The FAA said the move comes in response to two mid-air collisions near airports this year. Just this week, the agency said it was investigating the Black Hawk helicopter cross paths with a United Airlines flight near John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California — it said it would determine whether the new mandate applied in this case.
Guzzetti said, “It’s still a little disturbing. …But I still don’t think the sky is falling.”
He said, “The air traffic system is certainly stressed. It’s always been stressed, and it’s difficult for a bureaucracy to quickly modernize a system as complex as our air traffic system. I don’t think that’s going to change overnight.”
