On Friday morning, NBC chief Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles was tasked with providing Today with a full segment updating viewers on the investigation into the deadly January 29 mid-air crash over the Potomac River between an American Airlines flight and an Army black hawk helicopter, but predictably made sure to attack President Trump.
Nobles slammed Trump for “suggesting the aviation system is outdated without providing many examples.” In a clip from remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said this: “We should have had better equipment. We don’t. We have obsolete equipment.”
Fact-check to Nobles: Pants on fire. The air traffic control system (ATC) is, in fact, antiquated. Says who? Well, here was Nobles’s own colleague Tom Costello — who actually covers aviation for NBC — hours earlier on Thursday’s NBC Nightly News:
COSTELLO: [T]he FAA has notified airlines that it’s cutting the number of arrivals from 28 to 26 per hour at Reagan National with investigators concerned for air traffic controllers, “who have an increased level of stress while also having a front row view of the accident recovery.” Today, President Trump suggested the nation’s antiquated ATC system played a role in the accident.
TRUMP: We should have had better equipment. We don’t. We have obsolete equipment.
COSTELLO: The new Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy.
TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY SEAN DUFFY: I had a conversation with Elon Musk yesterday.
COSTELLO: — says Elon Musk will help overhaul air traffic control, which the FAA has spent years trying to upgrade but without full congressional funding.
How embarrassing.
Worse yet, Nobles (and Costello) played clips of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy as having said she’s open to “anyone” trying to help upgrade the system with Elon Musk being “certainly on the cutting edge of technology.”
And there’s plenty of articles prior to the crash sounding this alarm. This was a Wired headline from February 2014: “Why 40-Year-Old Tech Is Still Running America’s Air Traffic Control.”
Over two years later, an Economist headline read: “Antiquated air traffic control systems are becoming a serious threat to safety.”
How about CNN? In January 2023, an article on their website declared “Aging, outdated technology leaves air travel at risk of meltdown.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) — chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee — said at a December 12, 2024 hearing that this has long been a problem plaguing the industry.
Putting it more bluntly, Steve Forbes said this week that our air traffic control system is so old it uses “technology that belongs in the Smithsonian.”
Sure, the industry has discussed pleading with Congress for funding, but was it their clear top priority. A January 2023 article by our friend and MRC Bulldog Award winner Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon suggested, under Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that wasn’t exactly the case.
