You Are Not the President: What Tuesday's DCA Incident Actually Tells Regular Flyers About Their Safety
About this episode
The episode discusses a recent near miss incident at Reagan National Airport and explores the safety of airspace used by commercial flights.
A missed radio call at Reagan National this week put the president's helicopter in a near miss with a commercial jet. Nobody died. Nobody even remembers it happened by Thursday. Mike and Neal use that as the doorway into a bigger question: is the airspace tens of thousands of Americans fly through every day actually safe, and does it have the margin it's supposed to have? The mechanics get real fast. DCA sits inside the most complex Class Bravo airspace in the country, crammed next to military routes, the Pentagon, and a runway approach that's seconds, not minutes, from some of the most sensitive airspace in America. Mike walks through the Swiss cheese model of safety: disaster only happens when every single safeguard fails at once. In March, they all lined up at LaGuardia, when an Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck on the runway and killed both pilots. The country is short somewhere between 2,000 and 3,500 certified air traffic controllers depending on whose numbers you believe, and Mike argues the government's revised, lower shortage estimate doesn't match what he's hearing from an air traffic controller in his own family. Neal and Mike dig into why voice-based…
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