待翻译：The biggest threat to air-passenger safety may be our own government

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Marine One, carrying President Trump, departs from Joint Base Andrews in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images In the midafternoon of Tuesday, August 4, an air-traffic controller in the tower of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was surprised to find that he had an unexpected intruder into his airspace: the president of the United States. At 2:33 p.m., the helicopter on which he was riding, Marine One, and a lookalike Sikorsky VH-92A Patriot helicopter that serves as a decoy were suddenly in his airspace, moving from the grassy Ellipse near the White House southward toward the Potomac River. “National Tower, Marine One, proceeding as briefed,” came the radio call. The reason this came as a shock is that, by pre-agreed rules, the president’s helicopter was supposed to give the tower three minutes’ warning before it takes off. That’s no mere formality; D.C. is incredibly busy airspace, with commercial jets coming into land on a main runway that’s just three miles south of the White House. Numerous VIP transport, security patrol, and other helicopter flights are constantly threading through an airspace that’s been likened to a spiderweb. Keeping everyone moving without running into each other is a tall order, and the price of failure is tremendous — as attested to by last January’s midair collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet that left 67 dead. The three minutes’ notice would have given the tower a chance to halt all other traffic and give the presidential flight clear airspace. But, since no notification had been received, Marine One was now just chugging along right through the middle of everything. Air-traffic controllers are known to ream out misbehaving pilots, especially in busy airspace, but the president’s flight crew doesn’t get yelled at. “Uh, Marine One, you said, uh, you’re proceeding as briefed?” the tower said, sheepishly. The helicopter’s crew confirmed that it was. “Okay,” the tower replied, “no three minutes. Roger. Proceed as briefed.” Complications ensued. On the tarmac at Reagan airport, an Embraer E175 regional jet operated by Envoy Air was lifting off from Runway 1 on the western shore of the Potomac, bringing it within a mile of Marine One’s flight path along the eastern shore. FAA rules require aircraft within Reagan airport’s airspace to stay at least 1.5 miles apart vertically. The inability to do that resulted in what the agency calls “failure to maintain separation,” a rule violation that requires mandatory reporting to the FAA and a potential investigation by the National Transport Safety Board. To prevent another such failure, Reagan tower told another inbound Embraer E175, this one flying for Republic Airways, to abort its approach from the south. The plane circled around, rejoined its original approach path, and touched down 14 minutes later. And that was that. Marine One continued on its normal route to Andrews Air Force Base, where Trump boarded Air Force One for a flight to Los Angeles. No further traffic was disrupted. Everyone went about their lives. At no point had Marine One been dangerously close to any other aircraft. The chance of a midair collision was essentially nonexistent. For both the military and the White House, the incident was a nonevent. “Marine One’s flight on Aug. 4 was routine,” the Marine Corps told CNN in a statement. White House spokesman Kush Desai put out a statement saying that “Marine One flights are piloted by some of the best aviators in the world, and at no point was the President in harm’s way.” No problem, in other words. Had the flight crew technically done anything wrong? They’d followed the rules by calling the tower at Reagan airport three minutes before takeoff, but the message hadn’t been received due to poor radio reception. “Last calling, broken and unreadable,” the tower had replied. Surely it wasn’t Marine One’s fault that its transmissions had gotten garbled? Flight-safety experts say that, yes, in fact, it is a problem, and a big one. The issue isn’t just the risk of metal impacting metal, but the erosion of the standards of decision-making. If it becomes acceptable to break the rules a little bit, then it’s okay to break them a little bit more, and then a little bit more. Accident investigators call it “the normalization of deviance.” Marine One’s pilots, by failing to verify that their three-minute notification had been heard, were effectively ignoring the requirement that they give air-traffic control advanced warning of their arrival and needlessly launching into airspace that hadn’t been prepared for them. A recent proliferation of safety incidents suggests that the U.S. military has become dangerously cavalier. “They don’t feel like they have to follow the rules,” says Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former inspector general in the Department of Transportation. “They’ve skirted the rules several times before and nothing has happened, so they come to believe that they can skirt the rules all the time.” If the incident were a standalone screwup, it might not matter that much. But since the beginning of the Trump administration, cavalier disregard for flight safety by the U.S. government has caused a steady stream of disruptions to civil aviation, as well as two crashes causing more than 70 deaths. It’s no stretch to say that for air safety in the United States, one of the greatest sources of risk is now the government itself. Some standout episodes: January 29, 2025 The Army Black Hawk helicopter flew off course and directly into the path of an inbound passenger jet at Reagan airport, killing all 67 aboard both aircraft. The helicopter belonged to a unit, the 12th Aviation Battalion, that had earned a reputation for carelessness. “They do not know the rules of the road,” a civilian helicopter operator later told investigators. “They have a cavalier culture where they believe that they are the priority aircraft in the airspace, even to supersede the true hierarchy of priority set by the FAA.” March 1, 2026 Without notifying the public, the Secret Service conducts an electronic-warfare exercise near the approach path to Reagan airport, causing anti-collision warning systems to erroneously trigger on inbound airliners. Several abort their landings. May 1, 2025 A Black Hawk from the 12th Aviation Battalion decides to take a “scenic route” while flying to the Pentagon, coming close enough to two flights descending into Reagan airport that they have to abort their landings. February 10, 2026 After the Pentagon authorizes Customs and Border Patrol to start using lasers to shoot down drones near the Mexican border, the FAA abruptly announces that it is shutting down a section of airspace near El Paso, Texas, for ten days. The AP reports that CBP deployed the laser without first consulting the FAA. Fourteen flights were canceled before the FAA reversed its decision several hours later. February 26, 2026 Two weeks later, the U.S. Army shoots down a CBP drone near Fort Hancock, Texas. Again, the FAA temporarily shuts down a portion of the airspace. Investigators then find that CBP hadn’t notified the Army that it would be conducting drone flights, and the Army hadn’t notified the FAA that it would be using the laser system. May 14, 2026 An anti-drone electronic-warfare exercise hosted by the U.S. Army at the White Sands National Missile Range in New Mexico jams GPS signals for hundreds of miles. Pilots of a twin-engine turboprop air ambulance become disoriented and fly into a mountain. All four aboard are killed. All of these incidents have occurred amid the administration’s ongoing push to unshackle itself from rules. Under Trump, the government has dramatically cut back on interagency review and coordination and prioritized swift, unilateral action over research and debate. But while going one’s own way can be appealing as a strategy for getting things done, it starts to break down if each agency’s independence steps on the toes of everyone else’s. In a statement to New York, Democratic New Mexico congressman Gabe Vasquez, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, decried the lack of interagency cooperation. “From the tragic crash involving an Army Black Hawk helicopter in D.C. airspace to the abrupt closure of the El Paso airport in February to the tragic crash in Ruidoso in May to now this latest debacle, it is abundantly clear that coordination issues between the FAA and DoD must immediately be reviewed and addressed,” he wrote. Vasquez has already taken steps in this direction. This spring he sponsored amendments to the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act that require the Pentagon to better coordinate with the FAA before testing military systems that could affect civilian flights. “I’ll keep fighting for accountability and answers from Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Duffy to put an end to this chaos,” Vasquez said. Schiavo agrees the pressure from Congress is needed. “It’s going to require pushback from the Senate and the House,” she says. “The FAA does have the ability to get tough if they would have support from the hill.” Given that this administration views compliance with Congress-passed laws as optional, however, it’s far from clear what it will take for the agencies to change their ways. The Mysterious Case of the JetBlue Flight That Went Into Free Fall A Manned NASA Rocket Is Headed to the Moon. There Are Questions on Its Safety. Here’s How the Fatal La Guardia Collision Happened, Second by Second See All Tags: aviation politics u.s. military trump administration federal aviation administration marine one washington d.c. up in the air More Show Comment Marine One’s Near-Miss Incident Was Scarier Than It Looks Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.