An obviously-NOT-real generated-AI image to convey the idea of “a slower but safer approach to air travel.”

Here are quick answers to questions I keep receiving about air travel. This follows a post last week and then a Substack Live podcast I did with Ryan Lizza on how travelers should think about air safety.

To start with the most basic on today’s ten-question list:

1) Should I worry about a flight through Newark?

-If the worry is about safety, No. Anything can happen, but anything can happen each time you get out of bed.

-If the worry is about delays, or a tight connection, or close timing for a big event, Yes. Make other plans.

United Airlines has already substantially cut back its schedule into its Newark hub. Use them as an example.

2) Why should I worry about one thing and not the other?

The two answers—don’t worry about safety, do worry about delay—have the same origin: An immediate “better safe than sorry” consciousness in the aviation system.

Precisely because the US air-travel system has just been through the worst air disaster in decades (over the Potomac), and has ongoing problems in Newark and elsewhere, it is even more safety-focused than usual. As a result it is avoiding some routine shortcuts, and instead taking things extra-slow. In practice this amounts to added spacing everywhere: between planes as they taxi, between takeoffs and landings, among planes in cruise and approach, and in other ways.

The aviation world is full of mantras on how you travel fastest when you do not rush. As John Wooden famously put it about basketball: Be quick, but don’t hurry. In aviation that means: Be hyper-deliberate about checklists, even though you could recite all steps in your sleep. Double-check any clearance or instruction unless you’re absolutely sure. Think ever more carefully about what you’ll do the next time systems go down. It’s the airborne equivalent of waiting for a school crossing guard before stepping onto a road, even when everything looks clear. For the foreseeable future US aviation will be in crossing-guard mode.

3) Why is this happening anyway?

I’ll avoid calling this a “perfect storm,” though you can think of it that way. Instead I’ll say that we’re at one of the predictable—and long-predicted—failure points at the intersection of economics, politics, human nature, technological progress, and environmental constraints.

The intersecting forces, all brought to light by Newark, include:

—“Limits to growth” in air travel. There are only so many runways at the biggest airports in the biggest cities, and only so many airplanes that can land at a given time. That’s a physical limit at odds with travelers’ demands to get to popular places at “convenient” times. Thus approach corridors for hub airports resemble the road traffic below them. Landing at LAX at 5pm becomes like driving on “the 405” at that time. Approaches to the big East Coast airports from DCA to BOS become like I-95 that connects them.

Nearly 30 years ago, the renowned writer and aviator William Langewiesche wrote a major story in The Atlantic Monthly that said:

The most pressing issue that air-traffic controllers face is a surge in air traffic without a commensurate expansion of runway availability.

That was in 1997, when airline travel had nearly doubled since Jimmy Carter deregulated it in the 1970s. And since the time of Langewiesche’s article, passenger volume and daily flights have nearly doubled again. The number of hub-airport runways has barely changed.

—Chronic problems with public infrastructure. Everyone wants better roads—and bridges, tunnels, airports, rail systems. No one wants to live with the long, slow process of creating them. Or to pay for them. These infrastructure projects are far less glamorous counterparts of building the European cathedrals. Completing them spans decades—but political mood and leadership are quicksilver.

—Mismatch in tech mindsets. Commercial technology keeps leaping ahead because it can operate on the “we’ll try it in beta” mindset. Move fast and break things; learn from what goes wrong. Life-and-death systems can’t use the public as a beta-test audience. That’s why aviation technology, in particular, will always be a generation behind the latest commercial versions. It’s why the system at the heart of the Newark blackout is only now moving from “copper wire” landline-era connections to the fiber-optic networks familiar in business and consumer systems for decades.

—Human nature, which shows up as a mismatch in talent supply. As you may have heard, being an air-traffic controller can be stressful. Getting, training, and keeping enough controllers has long been a challenge—especially in the 44 years since Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 controllers at once, when they were on strike. In its final year, the Biden administration bucked a long-term trend by exceeding its hiring targets.

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4) Didn’t anyone see this coming?

Everyone did. Again to use my friend William Langewiesche as an example, in 1997 he laid out the problem, in a piece focused on … Newark!

Of the several thousand airplanes aloft during a typical daytime rush, most are headed for the same few cities…This is not merely because those places are where people want to go but also because to stay competitive, airlines need efficient route structures centered on hubs -- the now-familiar passenger-exchange airports that by their very nature increase the number of takeoffs and landings.

In our time, the most prescient advance-warning coverage I’ve seen is by reporter Will Guisbond, in an aviation-specialist, expensive-subscription-only site called The Air Current. A year ago he was warning about most of what is going wrong in Newark now. (Yes, I know, that readership is specialized and exclusive, but I wanted to give him credit.) The point is: These problems have taken no one in aviation by surprise.

5) OK, but why Newark, and why now?

The short answer involves a name that is becoming famous in aviation, “N90.” That is the New York area air-traffic control center in charge in charge of traffic flow for the major airports, including Newark, and smaller ones in the region.1

As part of a years-long process approved during Donald Trump’s first term in office, in 2024 the Newark part of N90 operations center was physically relocated from Long Island to Philadelphia. Trying to recount its whole history would be like trying to give the history of tensions in the Middle East. In brief: the supposed goal was to cut living expenses for controllers, and thus attract more of them. The counter-argument was that the move wouldn’t pay off in human terms—not enough people would want to relocate. Also, that it would be technologically fragile, and prone to failures like the ones that have now occurred.

There’s a tremendous amount more I’m skipping over.2 As a political reminder, note that this process began under Trump I, but Trump officials now fall over themselves to blame Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg for screwing up the implementation. The reality is that like other serious US problems, from drug epidemics to bridge failures, the responsibility is shared and decades old.

6) Is the Newark problem spreading?

In the greater New York area, yes. My pilot-chat boards are full of people talking about ripple-effect delays and cancellations throughout nearby “reliever” airports. These are the likes of Teterboro in New Jersey, White Plains in New York, and many smaller ones through the region.

To return to the freeway analogy, it’s like “surface roads” in New York or Los Angeles getting jammed, as people avoid gridlock on the freeways.

7) Will it spread across the country?