Flying Is Truly Terrible Now
Extreme weather conditions have worsened flying conditions headed into and out of almost any airport, making arrivals and departures less reliable.
Key points
- Once blue with clarity, the American skies are now clouded with uncertainty.
- The ARTCCs are FAA facilities distributed around the country, each one responsible for guiding aircraft through a specific region’s airspace, For example, the Chicago center handles northern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan.
- What airport-control towers do for take-off and landing, these centers do for the cruising portion of a flight—keeping aircraft safely spaced out from one another by assigning them altitudes or by guiding pilots around weather.
New York City area airports have suffered delays in recent days due to weather—a seemingly constant issue flying in or out of that city.
Air travel has become terrible, and it has done so slowly and over a long period of time.
Additional details
- On the internet, where citizens seem to revel in conspiracism, some people have connected today’s FAA ground stop with yesterday’s Microsoft Outlook outage —and the murky notion that advanced AI models might be responsible for both, and more.
- “For this to be affecting multiple facilities nationwide doesn’t make any sort of sense.” Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport has run out of tarmac space already, causing planes to be diverted elsewhere, the controller added.
- Even when the planes and pilots are available, the Air Route Traffic Control Centers are more sparsely staffed than they once were, while the number of flights each one manages has increased.
- According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” necessitated the action, which was undertaken for reasons of safety.
- My son and his sister, who both live in Manhattan, decided months ago not even to try to leave town for Thanksgiving, because delays and cancellations have become so commonplace.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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