On March 15, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a “safety summit” in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than two hundred “safety leaders” from across American aviation to discuss “ways to enhance flight safety.” What prompted the unusual summit was, by the FAA’s own admission, a “string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing.”

As the New York Times recently reported, such events have continued since the McLean summit, including one on August 11 in which a private plane nearly landed on top of a Southwest Airlines flight in Phoenix. Analyzing a database maintained by NASA that records confidential reports filed by pilots and air traffic controllers, the Times found roughly three hundred near misses in the most recent twelve-month period and evidence that the number of such reports filed have doubled over the past ten years.

One contributing factor to the growing concerns about safety is a shortage of air traffic controllers. A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that twenty of twenty-six critical facilities (77 percent of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85-percent threshold. That includes the vital New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility, which manages one of the most complex airspaces in the world and is currently at 54 percent of its staffing target (which is jointly determined by the FAA and the controllers’ union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association). Less than 1 percent of FAA facilities are currently meeting 100 percent of their staffing targets.