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Unknown A
Let's get to Southwest. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Air travel has been obviously a consistent concern over the past several months. And even going back years, we've been tracking how the decline in air safety and how nervous people are now to fly. And this image I'm about to show you is not going toa make you any less nervous. Let's put this up on the screen. This is a near collision as the Southwest plane is landing at Chicago Midway Airport. And just as it's about to touch on the ground, it has to pull back up to avoid this freaking private jet that then is taxiing down the Runway in front of it. So quick thinking and quick acting by this Southwest pilot. Kudos to them. You can see it here in slow mo just how close they are to a horrific collision. But that was not the only incident where this occurred within 90 minutes.
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Unknown B
And we could put this next piece up on the screen with some of the details here. Within the span of 90 minutes on Tuesday morning, two airplanes, one at Rean national, which was just the site of that horrific deadly passenger plane crash just a couple weeks ago, and the one we just showed you at Chicago's Midway International Airport, both were forced to abort landings to avoid collisions, according to federal aviation officials. So an American Airlines flight that was arriving at National Airport from Boston was making its final descent, suddenly had to cancel its landing, climb toward the sky, accelerated away from the airport. The last minute move allowed it to avoid colliding with another plane that was about to take off from the same Runway. That's according to the faa. The airplanes pilots were told to scrap the landing by an air traffic controller to ensure separation was maintained.
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Unknown B
And then the incident that you just saw around 8:50am Central Time, the pilots of Southwest Airlines Flight 2504 traveling from Omaha had to cancel the plane landing at Chicago Midway after a business jet entered the Runway with without authorization. So two insane and terrifying incidents. Like I said, kudos to both of those pilots for being able to make those maneuvers. My understanding is the one that you saw in Midway was a bit of a closer call than the other one. But both of them, it's like, what the hell is going on here? And in addition, Katie Pavlic, you can put this up on the screen. She was on a flight headed to some conference and she says her flight was just about to take off and the pilots land on the brakes upon departure. We were seconds from being off the ground. Terrifying incident, apparently.
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Unknown B
Saga she updated and said this was some sort of a mechanical issue or failure. I don't know what the hell is going on? Of course, this comes in at the backdrop of air traffic. The FAA has not been immune from Doge cuts. They say that they aren't firing any air traffic controllers. But a lot of the support staff, it's been reported, have been. Some of the support staff have been let go. You've got now Doge engineers or sorry, yeah, s SpaceX engineers affiliated with Elon running around this place and continuing to have terrifying incidents like this. There has been a shortage of thousands of air traffic controllers for years now. I have no doubt that there are some federal government agencies that and could be trimmed down and too much staff whatever whatever. The FAA is not one of them. This is one where you really need to step up, you really need to invest because air travel safety matters to people and all of these incidents are horrifying.
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Unknown A
Well, what's interesting about air travel is if you think about it, it's got a very different permission structure than almost everything else. The number of acceptable accidents is what, zero. So even with a failure rate of like a minute percentile, it's still too high. And it's one of those where you need to have the hundreds of billions of dollars that flow through the airlines and that the bedrock of like international travel and all is built on is when you get on a plane, it's not a problem. And so that's why even events like this, or like 911 for example, can wipe out an entire sector of the economy. And it's one of those. It's just fundamentally different. I mean, you and I are a business like we operate on a very different risk profile, right? We can absorb various different hits or we can think and take risks, etc.
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Unknown A
You can even do that in a car. As a society, we've just taken and accepted like we're gonna have like X amount of fatalities a year. And like that is what it is. But it's different for airlines because it's like control thing in terms of who's in power, but also just because if you started to see like cascading events and all that, it would remove and suck complete trust out of the system. So that's where I worry about the most. And I just think of what we're watching here. It's not a Doge issue because this is like a decade long thing. It's about lack of prioritization by the government. It is also a lot of privatization and financialization in the airline sector, a lack of oversight in over the probably the last 20 years. Like when we talk about Mechanical failure and all that. It just culminates where it's kind of like a Chinese EV thing.
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Unknown A
One day you just wake up and you're like, oh, shit, maybe these planes are not nearly as safe as they used to be. So it both happened over a long period of time, but it also wasn't that. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have incidents that were questions like this all the time. It could be a matter of information, but I do still think it's unacceptable. Tap things where they are right now.
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Unknown B
Of course. And the way it relates to Doge is because the whole ethos of Doge is privatization is stripping the government down and outsourcing everything. And that is the ideology that has led to the FAA being so bare bones that you're short thousands of air traffic controllers. That is the mentality that led the FAA to basically outsource their own safety regulations to the industry, where they're effectively regulating themselves. And oh yeah, this plane is safe, no problem, don't worry about it. That's the mentality and ideology that led us to that place. And now Doge has put that ideology on steroids. That's why it matters. And it's also, I mean, this is a perfect emblem of, as you were saying, soccer, when you're running Twitter and you cut a huge proportion of the staff and the Twitter spaces with Rohond Desantis fails, that's really bad for Roh Desantis and I did not help him.
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Unknown B
It was embarrassing for Elon. It was really pathetic. And then Trump did spaces as well. And it also didn't go all that well. But no one's gonna die, right? Some functions of government are absolutely critical. They're critical for life and death, they're critical for food safety, they're critical for veterans benefits, they're critical for elderly people who are relying on that Social Security check. They're critical for moms who showing up at the hospital, have a baby and who are on Medicaid. It shouldn't be run like a business because sometimes the results of failure are truly, truly catastrophic. And so this is a primary emblem of that where the core ideology of privatization and strip the government down, that is being pushed by Doge, is exactly how we got to this place where people are now second guessing air travel in a way that has never been the case in my life.
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Unknown B
I mean, I can speak for myself like, I want toa get on plane right now.
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Unknown A
Well, becausee it's not just this. It's near misses, it's the Boeing shit, that's the blowout. It's like, I mean, crash. I'm not gonnaag. I still think people should on plane. It's good for you. Get on a plane and go and travel. I've flown plenty since all of these crazy things. Am I clutching the thing a little bit more? Am I looking over in the window thinking about just making sure and be like, all right, what's going on here?
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Unknown B
Every time we land y even that just makes it so much less of a pleasant experience. Yeah. I used to honestly not think about anything. And I actually interviewed a dude who was on this plane that had to quickly take back off the one at Reagan national. And he was like, I was already really nervous because of the crash that just happened here. And I was feeling this sense of like, okay, we're two minutes to landing. We're almost there. It's gonna be fine. He's kind of white knuckling it. And then just before they touch down this sharp ascent and he's freaking out. S freaking out. I'm sure everybody on that plane was absolutely freaking out, like, what the hell is going on? So, yeah, it makes you so that if you're on the fence, you're like, I don't really wantna sit there in terror for several hours.
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Unknown B
I'm not really in the mood for that. I'm not asrenaline junkkeie it doesn't help.
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Unknown A
But every single day I drive past 66 crosses or whatever, which is for all of the people who died on that Reaganent flight. So if you live in the DMV area, there's. Yeah, it's like a literal I'm. That's a good thing, obviously. Remembereah d Every day I'm like, man, see planes come in.
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Unknown B
There were actually a bunch of people from my little town that had been coming back from a hunting trip. Read about that.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
A hun each show they were like contractors working in the construction industry. And so, yeah, that hit close to home for sure for a whole lot of people. But gets into your head and even though you could tell yourself the statistics, oh, it's safer than you're safer there than you are driving in your car to get to the airport or whatever. But when you're up in the air, it's a different kind of a vibe. You want to know that, like, okay, everything is locked in and they got this under control.
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
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Unknown A
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