Andrew Tangel
speaker
65 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Andrew Tangel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You essentially have a system that is starved of resources that has had a lot of political interference with its ability to get money and its ability to spend money. And the results is that the Federal Aviation Administration spends like 90% or more of its budget for technology and equipment on maintaining old systems that are in many cases obsolete or nearing obsolescence.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office issued a report and said basically about three quarters of the FAA's air traffic systems were either obsolete or too difficult to reliably maintain. The price tag really isn't clear for how much this broad overhaul might cost, but there are estimates within the industry and the government that
put the costs somewhere between $20 billion and $40 billion.
Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has made this a top priority. He wants a new state-of-the-art, envy-of-the-world air traffic control system. He knows it's going to be expensive, difficult to pull off in a short time frame, especially how he's going to pay for it, how it's going to work. All these other questions are important.
To be determined, the funding question is what has hobbled the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation over the years. He says he's got Trump's enthusiastic backing to do something big and bold and transformational for the system and can set it up for success where others have failed in the past.
The federal government has been cutting costs and cutting its workforce, but not the air traffic control organization. They have exempted air traffic controllers from workforce cuts and early retirement programs. They are trying to quote unquote surge hiring and try to retain the air traffic controllers, keep them from retiring by offering them bonuses.
So it is a question about whether or not this administration that is focused on slimming down in many ways can beef up a very anemic and neglected system that everyone seems to think is long overdue for an overhaul.
Thanks for having me.
Plus, President Trump decides to refurbish a Qatari airplane, frustrated by Boeing's delays in delivering a new Air Force One.
No, I wouldn't see it as a promotion, but it's certainly a serious game of musical chairs over here at the White House. Just after we were hearing rumblings that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was going to be ousted, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was actually just being moved into an empty seat. And that would be the U.N.
ambassador that was going to be held by Elise Stefanik until she was asked to come back to her role as a member of Congress because of the tight margins there in the House.
Well, this is another hat that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is going to have to wear. There was a tweet, I can't take credit for it, but just added up all of the different roles that he's now been appointed to. And in addition to Secretary of State and now National Security Advisor, he's the acting USAID admin. He's also the acting archivist.
So Trump is really placing a lot of responsibility in Marco Rubio. And that signals to us not only how much Trump puts his respect and trust in Rubio and his administration and carrying out his foreign policy, but also how he's going to at least approach the NSA role for now.
Waltz had been seen as on the outs in the West Wing and hadn't been as actively involved with some of the major foreign policy negotiations that are going on right now. You've seen Steve Witkoff has been traveling the world doing a lot of these big negotiations and deals. At the same time, the president's sensitive to the idea that he's giving a scalp to the press over the Signal episode.
Thanks.
New York has been a major bottleneck for years. That's our colleague Andrew Tangle. He covers aviation. It's some of the most complex airspace in the world, definitely in the country.
So if you think about it, you've got Newark, you've got LaGuardia, you've got JFK, and you've got all these other little airports around them, like Teterboro and so forth, and they're all stacked on top of each other. And planes coming from all around the world, helicopters, sightseeing tours in Manhattan, it's all just right there together, and there's not much space.
It's kind of like a metaphor for New York City.
Airlines are finely tuned operations, and once that's thrown off, it just sort of cascades through the nation's air travel system.
It's analogous to any profession where you have the same amount of workload and not enough people. When you've got too much on one controller's plate, the FAA, they basically, they slow air traffic down so that the controllers who are there can handle it safely.
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