Donald Trump’s transportation secretary said pilots were mostly to blame for a spate of high-profile plane crashes and near-misses over the past month.
Passengers have become increasingly worried about air traffic safety after an Army helicopter collided on Jan. 29 with an American Airlines jet landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft.
Since then, a small plane crashed in Alaska this month, killing all 10 people aboard, a Delta plane caught fire and flipped upside down at Toronto airport, injuring 21 people, and a Southwest Airlines flight nearly collided with a private jet that taxied into its path at Chicago Midway Airport.
Asked during an NBC News interview at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City if there was anything connecting the high-profile incidents, or if it was the “possibility of human error,” Duffy said Thursday that a “majority” of the errors belonged to the pilots.
“They’re all very unique,” he said of the incidents. “But I do think in all of them, and again not exclusively, not 100 percent, but a majority of the errors go to the pilots. There’s some pilot error at play in each of these incidents.”
Investigations into all four incidents are ongoing. Duffy has no training as a pilot, air traffic controller or air accident investigator but did star in Road Rules and The Real World: Boston before becoming a Fox & Friends weekend anchor.
On Wednesday, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the Midway incident on the pilot of the private jet, which belonged to the company Flexjet.
“It appears this was a failure of the flight crew from Flexjet to listen and abide by the instructions of air traffic control,” chair Jennifer Homendy told Fox & Friends.
A company spokesperson told NBC News it was “premature” to assign blame and that Flexjet was investigating the incident.
Nevertheless, on Thursday Duffy told NBC that pilots who ignore air traffic control commands should lose their licenses.
He also announced plans to recruit more air traffic controllers.
According to NBC, the FAA is short between 3,000 and 4,000 air traffic controllers and struggling to train and hire enough to replace those who retire. Applicants train at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, and more than one-third quit or fail before finishing. Another 20 percent leave once they’re on the job, the network said.
Duffy said the agency would fast-track students with the highest application test scores, accelerate the hiring process, and increase pay by 30 percent for academy students. Three years after graduation air traffic controllers would be making $160,000, he said.
“Young people, check it out,” he added.
But NBC reported the biggest issue limiting the number of trainees was not applicants, but the number of instructors, who are all retired air traffic controllers.
The recruitment drive comes less than two weeks after it was revealed that despite the crashes, hundreds of employees with the Federal Aviation Administration have been fired as part of President Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government. The agency was already understaffed.
Duffy said the employees who were fired were all recent hires who were still in their probationary periods. None were air traffic controllers or “critical safety personnel,” he said. But one air traffic controller told the Associated Press that the firings included workers hired for radar, landing and navigational maintenance.
