Are we having air traffic control fall out? Having a close call and then someone in your flight path again isn't great.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
218 points (99.1% liked)
News
31269 readers
2540 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean, the ATC pipeline has already had issues for some decades when it comes to adding new recruits, and then DOGE came in and decided to offer buyouts and fire random employees on top of that. It's only a matter of time before you get more accidents like the one in DC.
Also you will start seeing folks leave from burnout and overwork sooner or later. Because that's the corpo way, fucked over your workforce and need to desperately high more people? Nope just work the current ones to the bone until the whole situation inevitably spirals into an irreparable mess.
The rail companies are gonna be making bank on parcel and letter delivery when the planes get permanently grounded because nobody wants to operate a business with no ATC. Also wonder how long till we start seeing state level run ATC?
Nah, it's always the prelude to privatisation. Someone will start up an ATC company and just take over the whole thing.
Doesn't mean the ATC won't still collapse, knowing how this shit tends to go they'd probably gut the existing systems so badly that most companies would pull out of the industry at least in the US. Boeing's fuck ups have driven down air travel relatively recently, it's entirely possible airports would lose insurance and be shut down by the cities if things got bad enough one or two jets smashing into a suburb would be enough.
Remember these folks are evil, greedy, and stupid. Not saying they can't capture objectives but holding them? That's another question.
Oh of course, privatisation of infrastructure always ends up worse and more expensive. Look at the US railroads.
At least with rails the absolute worst that can happen is a chemical spill, with planes and jets it could be as bad as a chemical airburst not even factoring in debris fields and other secondary shit. Frankly speaking I don't think there is anyways to have a minimum viable ATC with a corporation at least not a publicly traded one since they'd probably sell it to some publicly traded company that'll be bunk in five years.
I mean, you can have worse than chemical spills with trains. You can have entire towns blowing up. But yeah, you'll probably get even worse with ATC.
I was thinking about that one derailing that dumped chlorine and more or less sterilized an entire valley back in the 80s(?). When I say chemical spill I meant worst case chemical spill.
And holy shit will it be worse.
No they won't. Remember, Regan set the present that he can fire them. And get new ones.
*fire them and then fail to find enough new ones for decades
It's that second part that's tricky.
wonder how long till we start seeing state level run ATC
They'll find a way to move it to the private sector before that.
I am not surprised to see they've already been trying. I am glad to see there is already organized opposition to the privatization of the FAA. https://nbaa.org/advocacy/legislative-and-regulatory-issues/faa-reauthorization-and-modernization/truth-atc-privatization/
It's cool bruh we'll just have xAI run the show using their Nazi bot who will prioritize flights based on how Jewish their passengers' last names sound
The tower involved was not a Federal Aviation Administration tower
Pardon? Who is operating a tower in North Dakota apart from the FAA? What is going on here? Why is there a tower in our United States that the FAA does not control?
“Long story short, it was not fun, I do apologize for it and thank you for understanding,”
lol, understatement
If I had to venture a guess I'd say it was probably the tower at nearby Minot AFB. Perhaps the commercial flight's approach took them over the bases' airspace or something.
I'm having trouble coming to grips with us having multiple air controllers. I thought everything was FAA and the military had to coordinate with them.
Good thing I don't fly an airplane, I suppose.
They use the same ATC systems and protocols, so handoffs between airspace should be the same whether it's a military or FAA tower.
So there's a whole other ATC controlled by the military? I honestly have no knowledge of this and am surprised.
Kind of. It is more the same system, just some towers are operated by the military and some by the FAA. Each has their own airspace they are responsible for, but civilian aircraft can fly through airspace managed by military ATC and vice versa.
I'm not sure why it is like that nowadays. I guess in the beginning of ATC in the US it made sense for air bases to control the nearby airspace, and it probably just went from there, with maybe consolidation of towers as a cost-cutting measure along the way.
Caveat: it's been years since I've had to know any of this, so this might be outdated or misremembered.
So why didn't the military tower catch the helicopter in that DC crash? The FAA failed but the Army also failed? Two failures?
I've not read the report, but there'd only be one tower responsible for the airspace. Iirc, it was an FAA tower. What I heard happened was that the helicopter didn't follow the tower's instructions. But, again, I'm months out of date on that incident.
Imagine airspace like a tray of cookies baked too-close together. Some are bigger than others, some are weird shapes, some are sugar cookies, some are chocolate. But it's a tray full of cookie. There's only one cookie at each spot.
To stretch the metaphor further, imagine an ant walking across the tray. It's still only on one cookie at a time and it doesn't care if it's chocolate or sugar. At the edge of a cookie there's a handoff between cookies, where cookie A says "hey, cookie B, an Ant X is about to walk on you. Don't let them crash into any other ants, k? They're your responsibility now."
Anyways, I'm going to go let my caffeine kick in.
lolwut? Cookies with ants on them. I just don't understand how there's a military ATC and a civilian ATC and they aren't sitting in the same room. They should be sitting in the same room.
Why would they sit in the same room? They're managing different airspace. There's over 250 towers, they can't all sit in the same room.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Im just hearing about this too, but that doesnt surprise me at all. Government black ops in mind, you can't have civilian ATC personnel having classified information on the location of military aircraft nor their capabilities. Of course the military is going to have their own branch responsible for handling sesnitive info.
Nah, I always thought that military shit flew through FAA ATC and they just handed it off to the next. I don't know what to think now.
My guess is the Air Force. Iirc, the Army and Navy also operate their own ATC. I didn't know they did approach control for civilian aircraft, but that seems to be the case.
WTF? I thought all air traffic was FAA, guess I was wrong.
Just saw a YouTube vid on this with the pilot apologising and the comments were blaming "DEI". i felt so tempted to ask them what part of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion they have a problem with
YouTube comments are full of the most braindead people on Earth
There's a reason "don't read the comments" is a cliche
Kudos to the pilot for handling the situation admirably
Should it be the other way around?
In aircraft and boats, the more maneuverable craft has the responsibility to evade. Since this flight was going to a small airport in North Dakota, I'm guessing it's a small commuter plane that's much smaller than a B-52.
Pilot here: while that is generally true, for aviation the rule is that aircraft types that are in the same category have to give way to landing aircraft. Ie, a hot air balloon doesn't need to give way to a landing fixed wing but a fixed wing and fixed wing do need to give way to the landing aircraft.
The Delta pilot should be commended and the B52 should have been more aware of their situation.
In addition, ATC clearance generally means you have right of way especially on a landing approach.
Thank you for sharing.
load more comments
(1 replies)
HEGSETH!
A similar incident happened earlier this year: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/delta-military-jet-close-call-dca/index.html
view more: next ›