Trump Is Grinding the System to a Halt

The nation’s roughly 15,000 air-traffic controllers don’t do exactly what some people might imagine—namely, keep airplanes from completely losing their way or falling out of the sky. As William Langewiesche memorably described in The Atlantic back in 1997 in ”Slam and Jam,” planes and flight crews are perfectly capable of taking off and landing on their own (as smaller planes do at the vast majority of the country’s 4,000 or so airports, only about 500 of which have control towers at all). And with modern navigation systems, pilots may have a clearer sense from inside the cockpit of where their airplane is, and where it should go, than controllers do from their radar screens.

What controllers make possible is the complexity and scale of the modern U.S. air-traffic system, and its ability to handle so many airliners, crammed with so many passengers, heading for the same handful of sought-after landing spaces at major airports, at the same peak travel times— for that system to have such