Is It Safe to Fly Right Now? with Kate Kelly

Summary

Smart Girl Dumb Questions: Is It Safe to Fly Right Now? with Kate Kelly

Podcast Information:

• Title: Smart Girl Dumb Questions
• Host/Author: Nayeema Raza
• Episode: Is It Safe to Fly Right Now? with Kate Kelly
• Release Date: May 30, 2025

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Introduction to Airline Safety Concerns

In this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions, host Nayeema Raza delves into the pressing issue of airline safety with investigative journalist Kate Kelly. The conversation arises against a backdrop of unsettling events in the aviation industry, including a deadly commercial airline crash in January 2025 and recent air traffic control outages at major airports like Newark, Denver, and Atlanta. Naheema sets the stage by questioning whether flying has become more dangerous or if increased media attention has simply heightened public awareness.

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Recent Aviation Incidents and Their Impact

The discussion begins by addressing the deadly crash at Ronald Reagan Airport in January 2025, which resulted in the loss of 67 lives. Kate Kelly explains that this tragedy was the first major commercial airline crash in the U.S. since 2009 and underscores the fragility of the current aviation safety system. Naheema recounts how, prior to the crash, there were already reports of near misses and staffing shortages, painting a picture of an industry under significant strain.

Notable Quote:

[02:11] Kate Kelly: "I think, no, I hope not. We do have to have some trust in the system that the FAA in this case is going to slow down or even stop flights in and out of, say, Newark or it could be another airport if they really just simply don't have the staffing."

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Systemic Issues in Air Traffic Control

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the underlying systemic problems within air traffic control (ATC). Kate Kelly elaborates on two primary issues: staffing shortages and outdated equipment.

• Staffing Shortages: The aftermath of the 1981 PATCO strike by air traffic controllers has had lasting effects, leading to a diminished workforce. The pandemic further exacerbated this issue by halting training programs, resulting in a severe shortfall of qualified controllers as air travel demand surged post-pandemic.

  Notable Quote:

  [07:27] Kate Kelly: "You've got a delay in new hiring. You've got sort of people aging out of the system. And what you have is a shortfall of air traffic controllers to the tune of thousands."

• Outdated Equipment: The FAA's reliance on legacy systems from the 1980s and 1990s has led to frequent equipment failures. Efforts to modernize these systems have been slow, hampered by bureaucratic red tape and insufficient funding.

  Notable Quote:

  [08:04] Kate Kelly: "I think the staffing is one piece of the other things we're talking about, and the equipment is the other piece."

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Political and Funding Challenges

The conversation shifts to the political dynamics affecting aviation safety. Kate Kelly highlights the bipartisan neglect of ATC modernization, with both Democrats and Republicans contributing to the stagnation. Recent efforts to inject funds into modernization, such as the $12.5 billion allocation in the Republican budget bill, are seen as positive but possibly insufficient.

Notable Quote:

[45:18] Kate Kelly: "The Republican budget bill included, I believe, $12.5 billion toward air traffic control modernization, which is a good start."

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Human Element: Burnout and Mental Health Among Controllers

Kate Kelly sheds light on the mental health challenges faced by air traffic controllers. The high-stress nature of the job, coupled with systemic failures, has led to burnout, substance abuse, and a reluctance to seek mental health support due to fear of losing job eligibility.

Notable Quote:

[37:27] Kate Kelly: "People turn to drugs or they need therapy, but they can't go because if they do, they lose their medical clearance to be able to do the job."

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Case Study: The January 2025 Crash

The episode provides a detailed analysis of the January 2025 crash involving an American Airlines flight and a Blackhawk helicopter at Ronald Reagan Airport. Kate Kelly explains the complexity of investigating such incidents, where multiple factors like equipment failure, human error, and congested airspace intertwine, exemplified by the Swiss cheese model of safety.

Notable Quote:

[17:56] Kate Kelly: "But there’s a lot under the hood, like potentially equipment failures, overly congested airspace, overly stressed air traffic controllers, and poorly designed air routes."

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Technological Innovations and Future Improvements

Looking forward, the discussion touches upon technological advancements and their potential to enhance airline safety. While fully autonomous aircraft are not yet a reality, innovations like Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) and experiments with satellite communications (e.g., Starlink) are steps in the right direction. Additionally, Kate Kelly emphasizes the need for continued investment in modernization efforts to keep pace with technological advancements.

Notable Quote:

[43:50] Kate Kelly: "There needs to be more mechanization and more state-of-the-art technology brought in here. It’s going to be expensive, and I think it’s going to be a learning curve."

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Rapid-Fire Aviation Q&A

In the latter part of the episode, Naheema and Kate engage in a rapid-fire Q&A segment addressing common questions about aviation:

• Who flies the planes? Pilots and copilots (first officers) handle the operation of commercial flights, working in tandem to manage communications and controls.

• What do pilot screens look like? Cockpits feature radar screens similar to those depicted in movies, displaying nearby aircraft and vital flight data.

• Communication with Air Traffic Controllers: Pilots maintain continuous radio communication with various ATC centers throughout their flight, ensuring safe navigation and adherence to flight paths.

• Alternative Communication Methods: The FAA is exploring technologies like Datacom (a text messaging service) to supplement traditional radio communications, though these are still in experimental stages.

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Conclusion and Takeaways

The episode concludes with Naheema reflecting on the gravity of the discussed issues while maintaining an optimistic outlook:

1. Dedication of Air Traffic Controllers: Despite systemic failures, controllers remain committed to ensuring passenger safety.
2. Comprehensive Reporting: Investigative journalism plays a crucial role in uncovering and addressing flaws within the aviation system.
3. Bipartisan Efforts: Recent funding initiatives indicate a growing bipartisan consensus to tackle aviation safety challenges.

Naheema also highlights the complexity of the issue, noting that solving aviation safety concerns requires addressing both technological and human factors within a heavily politicized and bureaucratic framework.

Final Notable Quote:

[50:58] Naheema Raza: "Kate Kelly's reporting was balanced. She gave credit where due and painted a picture of systemic, multi-decade failures that are now being addressed through bipartisan efforts."

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Key Takeaways:

• Systemic Challenges: Chronic staffing shortages and outdated equipment undermine aviation safety.
• Political Will: Recent bipartisan funding is a positive step, but comprehensive modernization is still needed.
• Human Factors: Air traffic controllers face significant mental health challenges due to high-stress environments.
• Technological Advancements: Continued investment in technology is essential to enhance safety and efficiency in air traffic management.
• Ongoing Vigilance: Continuous reporting and public awareness are vital to driving meaningful reforms in the aviation industry.

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Stay Informed and Safe: As aviation faces critical safety challenges, staying informed through comprehensive reporting and supporting efforts to modernize air traffic control can contribute to safer skies for everyone.

Transcript

[Naheema Reza]

We have had more technical difficulties than New York Airport this morning.

[Kate Kelly]

I need an extra cup of coffee for sure.

[Naheema Reza]

Smart Girl, Dumb Questions. Welcome to Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm Naheema Reza. And today my dumb questions are about what's happening up there in the air when it comes to safety. It's a topic that came up briefly in my recent episode with the points Guys. And I promised you a more thorough episode about all things airline safety before we kick into the summer because this has been a kind of frightening year for travel. In January of 2025, we saw the first deadly commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009. 67 people died, and we had been hearing about close calls and short staffing issues well before that. And then in recent weeks, we have seen these air traffic control outages, like communication blackouts in major airports in Newark, Denver, Atlanta. And all of this makes me wonder, is it getting more dangerous to fly or are we just paying more attention to it? My guest today is Kate Kelly. She's an investigative journalist who's worked at the Wall Street Journal, the New York observer, and for the last eight or so years at the New York Times. And she has been deep in the story of airline safety. She has talked to regulators, air traffic controllers, and spent time inside of air and helicopter cockpits, which I have to say is pretty damn cool. I needed her to help me understand. Do the pilot's screens look just like they do in the movies? Is air traffic control radio as bad as in flight WI fi? I'm kidding. That's not possible. Is it actually safe to fly? And with politicians pointing their fingers left and right, I wonder who is actually to blame for all of this and who is going to fix it. Here's my conversation with Kate Kelly. Good job. Welcome. Kate Kelly, thank you so much for being here.

[Kate Kelly]

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Naheema Reza]

I guess my first question for you is just, are we all going to die on an airplane? The points guy told me that it's not going to happen in a recent episode, but I need to confirm.

[Kate Kelly]

I think, no, I hope not. We do have to have some trust in the system that the FAA in this case is going to slow down or even stop flights in and out of, say, Newark or it could be another airport if they really just simply don't have the staffing. The slightly scarier thing is that the equipment, you know, can flip out without notice. They do have backup plans. I mean, these controllers are pros and they know how to sort of go to plan B. And Plan C. So I think the short answer is we're probably okay. But I think to the extent people are nervous, it is rational. It's not just paranoia.

[Naheema Reza]

You have personally bylined no fewer than, I think, 20 articles this year alone. You and your colleagues have had hundreds over the past couple years. Has your reporting changed how you fly?

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, it has. I'll be honest. I mean, first of all, just to set the table, I'm not a nervous flyer. I actually really enjoy it. I think it's one of the few times where I can completely disconnect and just read a book. I get a lot done on flights, but, yeah, I'll say it has, for starters, the nature of my job. I travel back and forth from New York to D.C. a lot. A lot, a lot. Like, sometimes every week, sometimes every two weeks.

[Naheema Reza]

But since DCA and dca.

[Kate Kelly]

DCA is Reagan National Airport in Washington. Thank you. Which is where they had that horrific crash on January 29th. So I am not doing Reagan national at night, and I am not doing Newark at all. Now, it must be said, I never was a big fan of Newark. It was never that convenient to where my family is in the New York City area. So I never used it much. But I'm not that comfortable now. Now, do I think that the correct steps will be taken if staffing is low? I do. However, it's these equipment outages that make me nervous. And even after Transportation Secretary Duffy put in what was meant to be sort of an immediate fix, this was a couple of weeks ago. They had a brief outage after that. It wasn't as bad as some of the others. So I think we're on the right trajectory. But that is a scary thought.

[Naheema Reza]

A less bad outage sounds like great news. Kate, what great news did you bring us today? Okay, just to get, like, a lay of the land, or I guess a lay of the air in this case. The timeline here is wacky. In the summer of 2022, we have Covid delays, shortages, outages, et cetera. Then in 2023, there's a big New York Times story by your colleagues, Emily Steele, Sidney Ember, and some others saying airline close calls happen more often than we think. And they talk about, you know, one or more near misses a day. Then in early 2024, Boeing door plugs start flying off airlines. We saw that Air Alaska flight. And then in 2025, we have the crash between a helicopter and an American Airlines flight at Ronald Reagan Airport. And now we have these outages in Newark Airport. And I believe We've seen outages in other airports, Denver, maybe Atlanta, elsewhere. So these five things, these five disparate things that have happened about airlines, are they connected in some way or are these just five different things happening?

[Kate Kelly]

Yes.

[Naheema Reza]

Is anything not like the other? Yes.

[Kate Kelly]

So the Boeing issue is separate from the other things that we're talking about. So let's sort of put that off to the side. But the other things, I think they're all connected. Some of them might be coincidental. So to me, the big picture is staffing and equipment. The staffing issue has been a chronic one over the years. We frequently hear from New York Times readers who want us to go back to Ronald Reagan's bust up of PATCO, which was the former Air Traffic Controllers Union in 1981. And when he broke that union, he also said that the air traffic controllers in that system at the time could not be rehired. So you had a sort of a start from scratch situation.

[Naheema Reza]

So in 1981, air traffic control workers went on strike. Ronald Reagan got pissed. He said, you can leave now. And they had to bring in a new crop of people. So the theory is that like everybody had to retire at the same time or we're all were having some kind of crank in the system because of this 1980s union issue right now in.

[Kate Kelly]

Some ways, I think that's a tough argument. I mean, those, some of those restrictions were lifted in the early 90s, and you would think certainly by 2020 you have this new generation, you probably have a second generation up and going because there's a mandatory retirement age of 56 in the FAA system. So that's a while ago, but it does come up a lot in these conversations. So then you have the pandemic and obviously there's a virtual grind to a stop of airline travel. There was a moratorium on training for air traffic controllers. Then when it resumed, it was sort of at 50% because they were trying to space people a certain distance apart. So there were all these Covid restrictions that made it tough to train people up in what really needs to be an IRL environment. Right. You're sitting with someone, you're looking at the radar. You can't do it from home. And that process can take literally years to do air traffic control at a Newark or a Southern California. That's maybe years and years. So that led to staffing shortages at just the time that we were recovering from the pandemic and air travel was exploding. Like, remember that feeling when you were finally comfortable leaving your home and you wanted to go out and do something. You wanted to see the world. You wanted to take a vacation.

[Naheema Reza]

You want to go to fucking Paris?

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, people were traveling a ton, and air travel has gone up, like, exponentially since pre pandemic. So you've got a delay in new hiring. You've got sort of people aging out of the system. And what you have is a shortfall of air traffic controllers to the tune of thousands. And that has just been the state of play in recent years. So Emily and Sydney did a piece on this in 2023. They did another piece very recently, like 10 days ago, showing that 99 of air traffic control hubs in the United States are understaffed.

[Naheema Reza]

Wow. Okay.

[Kate Kelly]

I think the staffing is one piece of the other things we're talking about, and the equipment is the other piece. And as I said, I think the equipment. It's both a long story and a short story. The long story is. And Sean Duffy would happily tell you about this. You know, this is the Transportation Secretary. Yes, Trump's new Transportation secretary, who's been very public about his concerns. To his credit, we have a very old system. Some of the equipment that air traffic controllers and others in the system use to take flight data from an airport and sort of route it to an air traffic control hub that could be 80 miles away is very, very old, like 1980s, 1990s, and I don't know why. And here's where I do wonder, and I don't have a satisfactory answer to this, why we're at a tipping point. Are we at a tipping point right now, or has this actually been gradually going on for a number of years and the reporting just hasn't been there because the public interest wasn't there?

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah, that's the big question. You know, one question is, if it's so unsafe, why is it still safe, I think for everybody who's traveling? And then there is a big question is, you know, are airplanes and airports breaking down more, or are we just paying more attention because of TikTok and the excellent reporting? And because we know as journalists that as you start covering a story, your sources start getting cultivated, you start developing more leads as it becomes more visible, more people are willing to speak to you on background or even go on the record? So do you have a sense of how much kind of observing the thing is changing the thing?

[Kate Kelly]

My educated guess is that more of this is happening because I've been somewhat involved with our coverage since 2023, but the first I heard of an equipment outage from any of my sources was last labor day, it was August 27th of 2024 at Newark. And there was another thing that happened a few days later and another thing that happened equipment wise, in November of that year. But all of a sudden, starting April 28th of this year, there was a spate of equipment outages.

[Naheema Reza]

Is this only happening in the United States that we know of?

[Kate Kelly]

I can't speak to that precisely, but I think it seems to be worse here than in other countries. I mean, we are now being unfavorably compared to a lot of different places.

[Naheema Reza]

Like for example, oh, Europe, Australia.

[Kate Kelly]

You just don't hear about this level of problem in other locales.

[Naheema Reza]

And do you have a theory of the case for why that we're reporting, ideally of why that is happening? Is that related to kind of the lack of regulation or the decentralization of airport authorities in the United States or the privatization of the commercial airline industry? What is it about America that has had the pandemic, had this long term shortage issue?

[Kate Kelly]

So if we posit that there is some sort of a tipping point right now, like let's assume there were outages and staffing issues prior to 2023 that we all just weren't as aware of and weren't as weren't reporting as aggressively on, let's assume that. But let's also assume that there's more happening right now than in the more distant past. I think you've got a variety of issues. I mean, it's not like just because we have equipment that's from the 1980s, it should all fail on a Tuesday in April. Obviously, like things fail gradually. One thing is problematic over here, then downline, you've got a problem over there. Like that's sort of how you would think it would evolve. I think the staffing shortages have been bad and are not getting any better. But more broadly, I think there's a whole variety of things that happen in the United States that make this a tricky place. I would say that air traffic control modernization efforts have been sort of languishing and underfunded for many years.

[Naheema Reza]

They would be funded by whom? The government.

[Kate Kelly]

Underfunded by the government. It's an FAA project. Right. But it needs congressional appropriations. It needs sort of White House political buy in. It probably needs more public interest and public urgency to motivate those electeds to unleash the budget money.

[Naheema Reza]

Right.

[Kate Kelly]

It's the procurement process, which I'm not an expert on, but just to give you an example.

[Naheema Reza]

But yes.

[Kate Kelly]

But it takes a long Time. And this is something you'll hear the current White House and the current Republican Party talk about, like, the dereg, the need for deregulation, the red tape associated with doing projects. There's a reality to that. I mean, Pete Buttigieg, we reached out to him for a fact check about who's responsible for these modernization attempts and failures or who's to blame for getting to this moment.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah. Who cheaped out on the budget to modernize this stuff since the 1990s? Like, who hasn't worked up? It seems like it's everybody. It's Democrats and Republicans, everyone who's been in college.

[Kate Kelly]

It's a multi administration, multi year problem. But when we asked the Buttigieg camp for comment on what did they do to try to aid in this, one answer we got was that they signed a new contract with Verizon for $2.3 billion to replace some of the infrastructure in the FAA with fiber. Right. Replace those copper wires you hear about with fiber. That was in 2023, and to my knowledge, it's still ramping up, and it's 2025, and we're in, like, a crisis mode now.

[Naheema Reza]

Maybe we need Doge to go to Verizon.

[Kate Kelly]

Okay. Well, as we know, Elon Musk has already urged the FAA to embrace Starlink, which is their satellite comms effort in aviation. And there is some experimentation going on with that in Alaska and other places. Yeah. I say this not to blame Buttigieg, but simply to say it seems to take years to bring in a new vendor to solve a problem that's been going on for decades, and that's kind of too long.

[Naheema Reza]

Totally. You know, the airline issue has become a political football. You have Secretary Duffy and President Trump blaming the Democrats, blaming Biden for this. You have former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg saying this is about kind of cost cutting more recently. So you're hearing it from all sides, but this seems like everyone's kind of in on it. Everyone's been complicit over multiple decades. And it's not just about Reagan in the 80s. It's every single administration since then that has failed to prioritize this issue. Is that fair?

[Kate Kelly]

I think that's fair. And I think this is a little bit of a tortured argument because airline revenue does not go directly to the faa. But I also think, as Americans, we want a great deal. Don't you? I mean, I want a really great fare for my vacation, but we expect to be able to pay, I don't know, 50, 100, 200, bucks to go somewhere. It really though doesn't support like a hot meal on the plane that's palatable, more space in your seat, you know, work a clean, modern aircraft, a happy staff. And I think to some extent that all redounds to like our level of willingness to contribute, but also height of expectations on safety and regulation as well.

[Naheema Reza]

That is the wild thing. There's great maps of this, like showing you how many seats pay for labor, how many seats pay for, you know, the cost of the infrastructure, the cost of the maintenance. And it's almost like if you're not operating fully sold out flights, you're often losing money on certain routes.

[Kate Kelly]

Right. And I think there's also a tail wags, the dog theory of it, which is the flying experience is often not very good. Right. Delays, change in gates, change in flights, whatever happens.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah, I feel like they should pay me to fly half the time.

[Kate Kelly]

Right. And there is no food. There's no food that you can even buy half the time. There's no TVs half the time. The wi fi is terrible. Like all these things, you know, the airports are overcrowded, that to get a bottle of water is like $5. So you think to yourself, well, I shouldn't be paying much for this because this is truly terrible. But those systemic issues are really more on the FAA side. Probably.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah. But you're saying something, you're saying something interesting, which is not only has the government been cheapening out, consumers have also been kind of cheap and tight in their wallets.

[Kate Kelly]

Right.

[Naheema Reza]

I want to zoom back out. So, you know, talk about this American Airlines crash, because one of the things, I feel like we do a bad job as a society of paying attention to stories down the line. And we are kind of all paying attention, rubbernecking when it's the big story of the day. And then we're like, oh, yeah, what actually caused that crash? And I was thinking, whether it's this or the California fires or the Miami Surfside tower crash, all these horrific things we stay glued to, we sometimes don't remember to follow up. You just did a follow up story on that crash. What actually caused the helicopter and the American Airlines flight to crash into one another?

[Kate Kelly]

Thank you for asking. First of all, very, very tragically, 67 people died. The crew on that Blackhawk all died. The 64 people who were on that American Airlines flight, which was four crew and 60 passengers, all died. The short answer is multiple factors. And that's part of the challenge of investigative reporting. And we all want sort of a Clean narrative. This one is not very clean. But there's an analogy you hear about a lot in air safety, which is the Swiss cheese model. Have you heard of this? No. So if you think of a block of Swiss cheese, right, there are holes in it, but they're in different places in the block. Right. They don't all line up. So the theory of the case here is that aviation safety is like a block of Swiss cheese. If you have a hole over here, like an equipment outage, it's not going to go right through the cheese into like some sort of disaster. And you might have another hole over here, which is like a pilot error in a hole. That's like a visibility issue. But they're supposed to be in different spots and they're supposed to be redundancies to keep the system safe.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah. So this does not sound appetizing.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, it's not appetizing at all.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah.

[Kate Kelly]

But hopefully you don't end up with a foodborne illness. Okay. This, this analogy has run its course. In this case, I think you did have multiple problems and the redundancies just failed. Or there were so many problems that the structure of safety could not be supported. So you essentially had an army helicopter that crashed into a commercial flight. It was in the wrong place, it was at the wrong altitude. It was flying round numbers. It was flying at about 275ft from sea level when it crashed into the airplane, which roughly speaking, was at about 313ft above sea level a second before impact. So clearly they should have been at different altitudes. And the right of way in the air was that the helicopter should have been lower. We don't know why that happened. Was there an equipment failure? Did the pilot have a health event at the controls? There are just some unknowns there, but for whatever reason, it didn't work. You had the air traffic controller who did do his job. He did do his job. And some people we interviewed, actually military aviators who had experience like that army pilot would have in that cockpit, said that actually that person went above and beyond by like, warning them several times that there was air traffic near them and they needed to look out for it. And they said they saw it. Right. Their response was, we have the traffic. But the air traffic controller, his phraseology wasn't exactly what it should be like. To give you an example, when you say there's air traffic control that you need to ascertain and avoid, you want to give more positional information like it's at your blank o' clock, look out the window. At this particular location, not just quote, unquote, do you see traffic? So the controller could have done more. We think that the controller may have been taxed because he was performing two air traffic control jobs at the same time. And while that is not uncommon, it's usually not done at that hour of the night in that location. It usually happens later when the traffic has started to taper off. And there are other issues. I won't go down the whole laundry list, but potential equipment failures that we know about, and a backdrop of overly congested airspace, overly stressed air traffic controllers, and especially these frequent military helicopter flights up and down the Potomac like this one that had sort of gotten out of hand. And then finally, I should say there was a very poorly designed air route, set of air routes that had the landing American Airlines flight on a glide slope that put it 75ft or less from a helicopter that might have been traveling down that route at the same time if it was in its proper place. And in this case, the helicopter wasn't.

[Naheema Reza]

And wasn't there also something like the Pentagon phone lines to Ronald Reagan airport were not working.

[Kate Kelly]

So that's a separate issue, which I'm happy to talk about, but that was not an issue here.

[Naheema Reza]

Okay.

[Kate Kelly]

That happened on a separate occasion. There's a phone line, like a sort of a hotline between the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan airport tower that has not been functional for three years. And we found this out very recently because there was a different army helicopter that flew sort of too close for comfort into the DCA airspace. No. No injuries. Thank God. Everybody was okay. But one of the factors that came out after the fact was that this hotline was broken. They do have other ways to get in touch, which is to say a landline. Oh, good.

[Naheema Reza]

Was a switchboard operator working that day?

[Kate Kelly]

I'm not sure.

[Naheema Reza]

It's all very 1980s as a tribute to Ronald Reagan. Did heads roll? Will heads roll?

[Kate Kelly]

Uh, ish. Definitely. The controller who was speaking to both flights has been interviewed by safety investigators. I'm almost certain his supervisors have. And other people that were in the tower. Some of those people have been on trauma leave. I believe the controller himself has been on leave within the faa. We've had a retirement. The person who ran air traffic operations, Tim Morell, retired.

[Naheema Reza]

And was this like a kind of retired. Oh, let me give you my fourth resignation letter, or was it a retirement?

[Kate Kelly]

You know, I can't answer that. I did look into it. I had the same question, and I got sort of different answers. But I think officially it was a retirement. And it seems he had told people he was looking to retire even before this happened. So hard to say on the exact timing. What else? I mean, we're already in a situation where we're brand new in an administration. So we have an acting administrator at the faa, we have a confirmed Secretary of Transportation.

[Naheema Reza]

So there are a lot of government agencies that you're talking about right now. There's the Pentagon, obviously, that has to deal with the military helicopters. That's its own separate thing. That's military aircraft. And then in civilian aircraft and commercial air travel, there's the faa, which is the Federal Aviation Authority, and that is under the Department of Transportation. Or is that a separate. Okay. There's also something called the ntsb, the.

[Kate Kelly]

National Transportation Safety Board, and I believe that's an independent entity, not part of the dot, and their job is to investigate any and all transportation accidents, any.

[Naheema Reza]

Transportation safety issue across America, whether it's Amtrak or this, etc.

[Kate Kelly]

It's an independent safety review board. And they'll, they'll do a sort of investigative reporting type of thing with multiple agencies and hopefully get the cooperation of all those parties. And at the end they'll put out a report. It often can take two years for a major disaster, and in this case, they've committed to one year for the January 29th crash. And they'll make recommendations as to what the FAA, in this case or other entities should do to improve safety. Those recommendations are not always taken.

[Naheema Reza]

Okay, so it's a non binding independent institution that is funded with taxpayer dollars, is that correct? Okay, got it. Seems a bit odd, and this was the first major deadly airline crash since 2009 in the United States. People always say that, like, first major deadly air. It's like, I don't even want to be in a minor deadly airline crash.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, the prior one was in the Buffalo, New York area. And I believe there were about. I believe there were 50 casualties. So not as many casualties, but that's sort of the closest comparable.

[Naheema Reza]

Right. And 2009 was also the year that Captain Sully kind of heroically landed that flight into the Hudson.

[Kate Kelly]

Did the miracle landing on the Hudson. Yes. Sully Sullivan.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah, Sally Sullivan. Okay. I think now's a good time for some like rapid fire dumb questions, just about what is up there on the airline.

[Kate Kelly]

There are no dumb questions.

[Naheema Reza]

Okay. That's the whole premise of the show, is that there are not, but there are kind of, don't worry, I can get one. So who actually flies the planes? Is it the pilot? The co Pilot, an autopilot.

[Kate Kelly]

So I think in the case of a commercial airline, it's the pilot and then they'll have a sort of small seat, co pilot in the right seat, the pilot's in the left, co pilot would be in the right. And sometimes they're called the first officer. In this case it was a first officer. And my understanding of this is the pilot is in charge, but obviously, you know, he or she has the backup in the, in the form of this other person if they need to go to the restroom, if they're impaired, if anything happens that they have to deal with. And you know, there's a lot of tasks involved with flying an aircraft. So you might often have a pilot at the controls and the co pilot is handling like the radio, the communications.

[Naheema Reza]

So there is no kind of Tesla self driving aviation yet on these things.

[Kate Kelly]

I think there is experimentation with that. In fact, Duffy was talking at one of his air traffic modernization pressers. He was talking about having like the Uber of the air, like drone air flights that are, I think they're sort of in beta mode. And I also think Uber sold that part of its company a few years ago, but you get the quick idea. So I think there's some innovation in that space. But I think at this moment, no.

[Naheema Reza]

But when a pilot is actually flying, what does the screen show? Like in the movies, there's, you know, there's this big circle and then the dots come and they show other airlines or other, you know, things in the air that are near them. Is that what air traffic on a plane looks like?

[Kate Kelly]

I actually did recently look at a commercial flight cockpit and also went and sat in a simulator of a Blackhawk helicopter. They're obviously different, but I think the basic premise is there, you do have a radar screen. It's circular. You have dots for the aircraft that are in, you know, within a certain vicinity. It's the same thing that the air traffic controller would be seeing on their quote unquote scope back at the air traffic control center. You obviously have the yoke, like the joystick that flies the plane. You have like hundreds of buttons and switches, like truly hundreds. You have your altimeters. You have several, well, at least two different kinds of altimeters. So a lot. An altimeter measures your height, your altitude, and you can do it in a couple of different ways. You can do it via radar or you can do it via air pressure, barometric pressure.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. And then who is communicating with them on the ground? The air traffic controllers of the airspace in which they're above, like how does it work that you're flying through from say Los Angeles to New York? Who are they talking to throughout that six hour flight?

[Kate Kelly]

So you're definitely talking to air traffic controllers. When you take off, there's probably a tower at your airport that's on the Runway somewhere and that tower is talking you through your takeoff and your like initial, you know, moment or two of flight, then anywhere from about five miles to 50 miles out of your destination, you are talking to what's known as the tracon, which is an acronym, it's Terminal Radar, Approach Control, something, something. Those are the people that are, that we're focused on with Newark. Got it. For example, they are not necessarily at the airport. They might be 40 miles away, or in this case the newark People are 80 miles away. They're looking at their radar scopes, they're in radio communication with the pilots and they're telling them who else is in the nearby airspace, what altitude they need to keep, what routes they can take to stay safe and separated. And then eventually, if they're doing sort of a long haul flight, as you mentioned, they're handed off to yet another group of controllers, which I believe is the center. So you'll hear about New York Center, Memphis center, whatever, and they will keep up with you through even longer radii of flight.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. And they could be anywhere at this point.

[Kate Kelly]

Right.

[Naheema Reza]

Cause like you're flying over, I don't know, Ohio or something.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah. Although I think it's geographically linked. I mean, I think at a certain point you're handed from, you know, LA to I'm just, you know, maybe Vegas. I'm just trying to think like what are the close air centers along that route?

[Naheema Reza]

You're kind of moving along. It's like a relay race.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, you're moving along. And then I think one thing that's notable with commercial pilots, as opposed to say military or law enforcement, is you have a radio where you can talk to other pilots if necessary. I think it's uncommon, but there was recently a situation with a near miss where one pilot told the other to like bear up to avoid a collision at the last minute.

[Naheema Reza]

That's like a what, walkie talkie?

[Kate Kelly]

No, they use their radar. I think there might be military jets that can talk to each other. But I'm just thinking of the helicopter I reported on that was in the crash. I know you don't want to be overly specific, but one issue there was they couldn't talk to the American Airlines flight, only to the controller. They were on different frequencies.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. Okay. Okay. And it's all done through radio?

[Kate Kelly]

Yes.

[Naheema Reza]

And what would be the alternative?

[Kate Kelly]

There are a few things that are under testing and consideration. For one thing, the FAA a few years ago rolled out something called Datacom, which is a text messaging service. It's hard for me to picture a pilot in the air benefiting from text messaging. Right.

[Naheema Reza]

But don't text while driving, especially if pre flight.

[Kate Kelly]

Pre flight, you can send, you know, flight plans and so on, which might, you know, lighten the load a little bit. And there are other communications technologies that, that are, you know, coming out and maybe adopted by the U.S. duffy has talked about voiceover Internet protocol, for example, being a better alternative in his framework for modernizing air traffic control. So there are different things at play, but for now, radio is sort of the tried and true in the US system. Radar for visual, radio for communications.

[Naheema Reza]

And do you think, like, by the way, I know our former colleague at the New York Times, Nick Bilton, did some reporting on this, but like, nothing is interfered with when you like turn on your phone on the flight or you are.

[Kate Kelly]

You know, I've asked this just. I haven't done any reporting on this, but I've asked this as a civilian because frankly, half the time I just forget to put it in airplane mode and I'm like, what's the real issue here? Like, why is it a problem? I've never gotten a clear answer. Have you?

[Naheema Reza]

It's kind of like you shouldn't probably use it. But also, I've seen people take zoom calls on airlines before, so just have to wonder.

[Kate Kelly]

Their wi fi doesn't support video streaming.

[Naheema Reza]

Is my experience now. It does, yeah.

[Kate Kelly]

I can barely even get an email going. Are you kidding? Like, don't. I could go on a tirade.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah, it's like you can't get on when you want to, like stream, you know, Emily in Paris. But you can definitely get on when you need to take a meeting you don't want to join anyways. Are the newer planes safer than older planes?

[Kate Kelly]

I can't generalize. I mean, the planes in and out of Newark are operated by United and other airlines and they probably have a variety of new and old aircraft. I don't think that's germane to the airport location.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. So the core of the issue, it wouldn't explain why there's more in one place.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, and I don't think it's the airplanes either. I think it's the. I think it's the government owned equipment in the Air traffic control centers, not so much what's present on the airplane. The airplanes actually have some great technology. I mean, for example, they have something called tcast, tcast, tcas, which is Traffic Collision Avoidance System, I think. And that'll warn them audibly and with a visual like traffic traffic when somebody's nearby them, they'll sometimes get what's called an ra, which is a resolution advisory. You need to resolve this potential conflict that is a potential collision in the air. The only problem with TCAs is when pilots are landing or I assume taking off as well. They need to be hyper focused on that landing process. It's like it requires a ton of focus and preparedness. So to be listening to the traffic, traffic as they get closer to many other airplanes as a matter of course is something they can't really do.

[Naheema Reza]

Is it more dangerous when planes take off or land? Is one of those more scary or dangerous or require more.

[Kate Kelly]

Not that I know of. I mean, you do hear that the most dangerous parts of a flight are on takeoff and landing, and I assume that's simply because of congestion. But I don't know that one is more dangerous than the other.

[Naheema Reza]

Is there a fail safe that happens if radio goes down or radar goes down? What is the fail safe?

[Kate Kelly]

So great question. I could speak to what's happened at Newark. Even in the worst case, I don't think all the radar went down. I think several radars went down, but a couple of them were still working. Now this is not a quick fix. It's not like I have a universal view. If I'm a controller of your traffic and that guy traffic, as I'm watching my traffic, I usually have only my traffic. But I think there's an ability to go to another workstation and add other traffic. It's just not real time. It's not able to happen with the urgency that you need. Your workaround is you call on a landline, perhaps your colleagues in another center and say, hey, we've had these outages. Please watch these planes or hold your planes because they might drift into my airspace or whatever. You rely on your colleagues in other places, I think is the short answer while your system reboots. But you also hold planes in position. You have them circle or you maybe have them. If they're a helicopter, you could have them hover. You can't really have a commercial airplane hover in the middle of the air, but you could take them in a loop or you could tell them not to advance to the airport. You could prevent new traffic from Taking off and further congesting the air at a time when you don't have great visibility or comms.

[Naheema Reza]

When we talk about airline close calls, what is a close call, distance wise?

[Kate Kelly]

That's a good question. I am not sure. I mean, I could tell you that typically you want to have something like 500ft of vertical distance between aircraft and a mile and a half to three miles between airplanes. Like laterally speaking.

[Naheema Reza]

The air traffic controllers that you're talking about, these guys who are. And gals who are calling each other maybe when there's issues. Do they have the same shift schedules as pilots? Like we've all been delayed because the crew needed to get X number hours of rest?

[Kate Kelly]

No, I don't think so. I think air traffic control has kind of a set of shifts that they agree upon with their union and the government. And it's more or less it's like 7 o' clock to 3 o' clock in the afternoon and then 3 to 10 and then there's an overnight shift. I think pilots shifts are whatever they need to do for their given trip. But I do think they can only work for a set number of hours before they're timed out. And I want to say that's 12 hours. But I think that may also depend on the distance they're flying. And is it at night? Is there weather? I don't know all the ins and outs of that, but I do know that I recently got on a flight in New York for Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. And the gate agent was like, everybody hurry up because the pilot's gonna time out, but he's maybe willing to still take you.

[Naheema Reza]

It's like.

[Kate Kelly]

And we got on and the pilot was like, I'm sorry, y' all, I can't. I've been flying for 12 hours. We had bad weather coming up here. I don't think it's a good idea for me to take you back. And I literally thanked him as I was getting off because, hey, yeah, you.

[Naheema Reza]

Gotta call it, gotta call it. The reporting I'm reading right now is that these air traffic controllers, which I would've thought air traffic controllers, like kind of a good job. You get paid for your training, you have a certain amount of protection from the union. You know, you have kind of earlier retirement age at 56. Do they like their jobs right now?

[Kate Kelly]

You know, a lot of the people I talk to love the work in general. I think my impression is there's a collegiality that develops that's almost like you hear about in the military or maybe in like, an ER where you have just an intense level of teamwork and the stakes are incredibly high and your skills are very technical and, like, in the best of times, that has you bond with your colleagues in a. In a very unusual way. And I'm generalizing, obviously, there are probably some people that hate the job, but a lot of them feel let down by a variety of people. Supervisors, the faa, the union, the American public wanting more than they can reasonably give. I mean, I think they're very sympathetic to passengers. You know, they want passengers to feel safe. They want to keep them safe. But when you're operating and your scalpel is broken or the power goes out and you can't defibrillate a patient, like, what are you supposed to do? So I think the sense of kind of betrayal is really profound with some people. And I think this also, sadly takes a real toll on mental health. Like, Sydney and Emily did a really affecting story about this in 23. Like, people turn to drugs or they need therapy, but they can't go because if they go, they lose their medical clearance to be able to do the job.

[Naheema Reza]

Wait, what? Explain that.

[Kate Kelly]

I mean, you need to be declared physically and mentally fit to do this kind of work. And I don't know all the details, but I think the fear is if you are in, you know, mental health care and you're diagnosed with anxiety or depression or something like this, you may not be regarded as mentally fit to do the work.

[Naheema Reza]

Okay, so. Wow. So there's.

[Kate Kelly]

So it's a chicken and an egg problem, really?

[Naheema Reza]

When you talk to these guys, is it very, like, hushed tones? Does it feel like Deep Throat in the X Files? Like they want to tell you, but it's all off the record.

[Kate Kelly]

It's all secret or no? Yeah, I mean, some of them are nervous. I think right now you're seeing, like, a collective, like, just exhaustion and frustration. And if they were ever going to speak out, it's going to be now.

[Naheema Reza]

And the burnout that we're seeing amongst air traffic controllers is that. Are we seeing a similar kind of burnout amongst pilots?

[Kate Kelly]

Okay, so I haven't reported on this issue, but anecdotally, no, I'm not hearing that. And if anything, I'm hearing pilots rallying around controllers. I mean, during one of the recent. This is sort of poignant, I thought during one of the recent Newark outages a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to the air traffic control audio, which is available online, to see if I could isolate that moment where the equipment went out and I didn't find it. Maybe I was listening to the wrong time segment, but I did hear at one point a controller talking with a pilot in the Newark airspace. And the pilot said, hey, we're rooting for you guys for better equipment and no outages. And Newark, just so you know, we're all rooting for you for better equipment and more stuff. Hey man, we appreciate it, thanks. So I think there's a real sense of camaraderie and a real sense of concern for the well being of those workers.

[Naheema Reza]

So at Newark we're seeing these outages, 30 seconds, 90 seconds, we're hearing, does that amount of time really matter? Like, is anyone going to land when they aren't getting. Yes.

[Kate Kelly]

No, it matters. I mean imagine, imagine if you are watching two aircraft fly through the sky at 500 knots. It's a nautical mile measurement for some reason per hour. And think how close two things could get to each other in a matter of seconds, two seconds, three seconds. I mean, absolutely, 30 seconds is an eternity.

[Naheema Reza]

But what's happening when those 30 seconds are going on is that no one is taking off or landing. Right. They're just.

[Kate Kelly]

Well, no, because let's say we're talking about radar. Cause you often have like a, a 90 second radar outage. It might be 30 seconds of like a black screen, but then it reboots itself and that takes the remainder of the time. So you're watching multiple flights in midair.

[Naheema Reza]

Like how did it descent?

[Kate Kelly]

No visual. Kind of like what was happening to us when we were trying to record earlier. No visual at all. You know, it's critical that you have that.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. And this is not just happening at Newark Airport.

[Kate Kelly]

Right.

[Naheema Reza]

We've seen outages happen elsewhere across the country.

[Kate Kelly]

We have, we have. So one notable one was a 90 second outage that happened in the Denver area pretty recently. This was the Denver center, which is the sort of longer hall flight oversight hub. And it's located outside of Denver in a city called Longmont. So that happened and I've heard of sort of brief outages in other places, but those are probably the two major ones that I know of recently. That and the hotline that runs between the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan airport.

[Naheema Reza]

The three year outage. Yeah, that three year outage. Yeah, that sounds pretty terrible. Why don't they just shut down the airport? Like why right now do they not just shut down New York Airport and then get to what is at the bottom of it and fix it?

[Kate Kelly]

Well, I think that might be considered untenable. By the airlines and even the flying public to do that. You're talking about a fix that optimistically could be done by the end of the summer and, you know, maybe by the end of the year or maybe even in a year. So you're going to shut down all the air traffic in and out of Newark for that period of time. I mean, people would lose their jobs. It would be, like, a serious revenue risk to the airlines and potentially risk their viability. Passengers wouldn't be able to get places. You know, not only would passengers not be able to get places, they'd have to be refunded. I mean, there's an argument for doing that. But I will say the outages seem to be slowing in frequency and in length.

[Naheema Reza]

Got it. When all of this is happening, are there, like, CEOs of airlines calling up heads of the FAA, talking to the New York Airport person and all that? Right. There's a huge negotiation of, like, we can't afford to shut down because we've seen, you know, FAA come out and say, oh, it needs to be X number of planes. And then they're like, oh, they're going to have X +2 number of planes landing at this time, or whatever the case.

[Kate Kelly]

I mean, I have wondered why we haven't had a ground stop, like, no flights in or out of Newark on certain ships where I happen to know they have, like, one certified controller and a couple of trainees. I mean, to my layman's eyes, like, one controller doesn't seem like enough to.

[Naheema Reza]

Handle the whole airport.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, I mean, they will have one to two trainees who can do, like, one position at the airport, but the controllers can do all the positions if they have to. The certified controllers, that to me, seems low, but even controllers will tell me that's not totally unusual and it can be done. But bear in mind, for these shifts, I know Newark better than other examples, but for these shifts where they have one plus a trainee or two, oftentimes the target is 10 people. The target is 14 people. And these are not 1981 objectives. These are objectives that were set in accordance of the FAA and the controllers union in January for that airspace.

[Naheema Reza]

In January, they said There should be 14 people operating this 14, you know, combination of controllers.

[Kate Kelly]

They said they have one trainees, one and a half. Like, okay, not half a person, obviously, but a person that can do a portion of the job.

[Naheema Reza]

All this sounds wild. Is it going to be safer when technology and AI are flying planes? Like, is the human layer the problem? The humans and the coordination I mean.

[Kate Kelly]

I think the human layer is actually not the problem. I mean, I guess it's a problem if you consider that short staffing is part of our dilemma here. But I think this requires perhaps a human eye to move across multiple spaces and multiple platforms, to sort of consolidate a picture in their mind and make subjective decisions. What do I mean by that? I mean, a machine could look at the radar and the radio and maybe even have more seamless interactions. They could look at the other air traffic, gauge their speed and so on, but they couldn't then necessarily turn to a colleague and say, what are you seeing over there in LaGuardia? Or pick up a phone and say, what's happening up there? Or watch while a machine fritzes out on the other side and can't do its job. I mean, it's hard for me to see eliminating the humans from the picture because of all the unknowns. There is AI experimentation going on, though. The FAA has embraced that, and that seems like probably a good thing. I mean, we need to see how it works and work out the kinks, but, like, absolutely, there needs to be more mechanization and more state of the art technology brought in here. It's going to be expensive, and I think it's going to be a learning curve.

[Naheema Reza]

Are they finally ready in Washington? I mean, everything, obviously, there's a lot of Doge kind of movement going on right now. There's a lot of issues in Congress. There's a bill that's, you know, Trump's bill that's being considered that I think you're reporting on.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah.

[Naheema Reza]

Is airline travel a priority in Washington right now?

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, the, the Republican budget bill included, I believe, $12.5 billion toward air traffic control modernization, which is a good start. I don't know if it's enough, but it's a good start.

[Naheema Reza]

Do you know what that compares to in previous years?

[Kate Kelly]

Well, like in the Biden administration, they made a, an $8 billion proposal in the final couple years of the administration that did not pass. They also had some set aside in the infrastructure bill that I believe was $8 billion a year, but those amounts are not enough, and I'm not sure 12 and a half is enough, but it's definitely directionally encouraging. Now, we also don't know if this bill is going to pass the Senate. My sense is this is right. It may have been a historic bipartisan failure, but I do think now it's a bipartisan priority. So you would think that there will be mutual interest in getting that piece of.

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah, it Seems like they're. Yeah. Bipartisan agreement on, like this is an issue. Bipartisan agreement on. It's the other guy's fault.

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah. And at the, you know, there's a Senate Commerce Committee that oversees these issues. They've held a few hearings recently, and you can see pretty good, you know, mutual consolidation among the between the parties on, you know, the need for improvement here.

[Naheema Reza]

With all of this happening, can we still say the US is the safest country on Earth to travel?

[Kate Kelly]

I mean, one of them. I actually researched that statistic recently, Naima, and it was hard to find good data to support that. I mean, I think it's widely regarded as one of them, but it's like, how are you measuring that? I mean, we have a huge airspace with a ton of users, and are we looking at fatalities? Are we looking at equipment outages? Is that stuff even universally tracked in venues around the world? Like, I don't really know. I think it is one of the safest and most sophisticated, but I think clearly we're not in a good place right now.

[Naheema Reza]

This is really sad for me, by the way, because I know you don't fly out of New York, but I fly out of New York all the time. And I just flew back into New York the other day from Park City, and I'm on the west side of New York, so it's just convenient.

[Kate Kelly]

And how was your experience?

[Naheema Reza]

It was fine. There was a delay, but I also had a backup flight to JFK and that flight was also a little bit delayed by 15, you know, it was ended up being 45 minutes delay. In my mind, though, I was thinking it's going to be a delay issue, not a crash issue. I don't know why I had that sense. Is that why you're avoiding New York? Because you think it's going to be delays or because you're actually scared for your life?

[Kate Kelly]

I just don't feel comfortable knowing what I know about the staffing and the recent equipment outages. I mean, I kind of hate to say that because I don't want to alarm people, but that's just my opinion. But like I said, it wasn't an airport I tended to use, so it's not a huge change for me anyway.

[Naheema Reza]

Okay, but now you're making me think twice about this. This is the Swiss cheese. It's giving me all kinds of fears. We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb questions asking our guests what you, this imminently smart person, are dumb or curious about what you haven't been able to solve or a Question that you've been afraid to ask out loud. Do you have one?

[Kate Kelly]

Yeah, I have one. Maybe it's germane to what we're talking about. So I really love mystery novels, true crime, horror movies. I like it. Why is it fun to be scared?

[Naheema Reza]

Oh, that's a good question. Why is it fun to be scared? Okay, I like that because sometimes it's.

[Kate Kelly]

Just scary to be scared, right?

[Naheema Reza]

Yeah.

[Kate Kelly]

But other times, you know, we love a great mystery, we love a great horror movie. It kind of takes us, I guess it takes us out of our headspace, but in a scary way.

[Naheema Reza]

Totally.

[Kate Kelly]

Maybe because we know it's fiction. It's like a safe space.

[Naheema Reza]

I was right. That is a really good question. I remember there's also this, like, test, dating compatibility test, which is like, three questions you should ask to find out if you and your partner are compatible. And, like, one's like, do you like traveling alone? And another one's like, I forget what the other one is. But the third one was, do you like horror movies? And if you both like horror movies, that's like a good indication. So why do some. An offshoot of your question to build on it would be like, why do some people love horror movies and other people don't?

[Kate Kelly]

That is definitely true. And I wondered about that myself. Some people get nightmares. They get nightmares really easily and therefore they avoid it.

[Naheema Reza]

And I may. And I'm also like, does watching true crime make us commit more true crime as a society? Like, could you track it?

[Kate Kelly]

Oh, gosh, I hope not.

[Naheema Reza]

I know, but these are good dumb questions.

[Kate Kelly]

I do sort of like the fictional more than the. Than the real. But I will listen to true crime as well.

[Naheema Reza]

For sure. I know. I mean, Netflix has made us, you know, and serial have made us all true crime addicts. I feel like there's another dumb question I have about airlines, which is like, does any of this have to do with climate change? Like, is the air less safe because of climate change? But what you're talking about is about technology on the ground and in the air.

[Kate Kelly]

I don't see the connection right now unless you factor in the idea that we're seeing more extreme weather. And weather disruptions are going to be complexities all down the line all throughout this world. They're going to add to delays, they're going to add to stress. I've learned a great term through this reporting, which is task saturation. Pilots that are in the cockpit and they have a million things to do just to get that plane where it needs to go. And to land, it's task saturation. So terrible weather that affects your visibility, that affects your altitude, that adds turbulence that could, could knock out power lines. You know, those copper wires, like it's, it's a huge, to quote Jeff Bezos, complexifier.

[Naheema Reza]

Yes. That wouldn't explain why there's more of these in the United States though, than elsewhere. So like we would be seeing, you know, the Dhaka airport in Bangladesh would be like really struggling if this were, you know, all around climate change. So. Okay, anyway, speaking of task saturation, I know you have something to get to, so I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much, Kate, for spending time with me on this. This was great. Really helpful.

[Kate Kelly]

So fun.

[Naheema Reza]

Huh? Does anyone want to share a cab to jfk? Because after that episode, I will be rerouting all of my summer travel plans, I think. But I was so appreciative of how deep and thorough Kate Kelly's reporting was and how balanced it was. She didn't blame it all on Ronald Reagan or on Pete Buttigieg. She gave credit to Trump's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, where credit was due. And she really painted this systemic problem, this, as she called it, multi decade, multi administration failure to plug the holes in the Swiss cheese system of airline safety in this country. And it really is systemic. It is partly about the politics and the bureaucracy. The fact that, you know, there's this oversight ish board that issues non binding recommendations after two years, that seems too little too late. And it's also the capitalism, the kind of profit incentive to keep these things going so that no one loses money. And it's the consumerism, the fact that I, and maybe you want a good deal when we're up in the air, to quote Taylor Swift, I'm the problem, it's me. But a few things kept me optimistic throughout that conversation. The first is the kind of dedication and mission orientation of these air to air traffic controllers. I mean, they sound like they're putting up with a lot. I'm so glad the pilots have their back and it is not an easy job and you have to trust that they are trying their damnest to keep us safe up there in the air. The second is the excellent reporting that's being done at the New York Times and elsewhere to really understand this issue and to kind of expose cracks in the system so that we can plug them. And the third is this bipartisan energy and effort that has finally come to pass to fix this issue. It took tragedy to get here, but there's finally some movement and I think that's a really good thing. I for one in the meantime am happy to pay a little bit more to be a little bit safer in the air, but I intend to still complain about those weird biscoff cookies and that melon that like tastes like nothing. What is that weird melon? Anyways, in all seriousness, stay safe out there if you're traveling. And if you do like traveling, check out my episode with the Plug Points Guy or Points guys Brian Kelly and Nikki Calvin. You can find it wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. That's it for today. This episode was produced with Dana Balut and Noah Friedman with special thanks to Healy Cruise. If you like this episode, give us a five star review like you'd give to your Uber of the air. And please send me all of your dumb questions. Naimaraza101mail.com I'll see you next week for an all new episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions.