An American Airlines flight bound for Boston was forced to abort takeoff at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday morning to avoid another plane that was landing.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it’s investigating what happened. It’s the second such incident at the Washington, DC, airport in the last six weeks.
“An air traffic controller cancelled the takeoff clearance for American Airlines Flight 2134 because another aircraft was cleared to land on an intersecting runway,” the FAA said in a statement about Wednesday’s scare.
The fuck is going on with planes lately?
The same thing that’s been happening for a while, just delayed for a bit from covid. Airports are at peak capacity in a lot of places and building more isn’t happening fast enough. Air traffic controllers are overworked and understaffed, this makes mistakes more common. Especially when trying to have 20% more planes pass through an airport than it was really designed for.
And like so many things in modern life, you can lay at least part of the blame on Reagan. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union in order to force them to accept longer hours, lower pay, and brutal shift schedules – look up “The Rattler” sometime, and then realize that the person directing traffic at airport that thousands of people are arriving and departing from every hour probably hasn’t slept for more than a couple hours in the last three days.