President Trump suggested the business jet pilot who was involved in a near-miss at Chicago’s Midway Airport on Tuesday have his license suspended in a fiery post on social media.
“GREAT JOB BY THE SOUTHWEST PILOTS IN CHICAGO. A NEARLY TRAGIC CLOSE CALL. PERHAPS SUSPEND THE PILOTS LICENSE OF THE OTHER PLANE, WHO MUST HAVE BEEN ‘SLEEPING!’” the president wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post.
No passengers were injured after the Southwest pilot lifted back into the air after nearly touching down, preventing the plane from colliding with a taxiing jet.
Flexjet, which operated the smaller plane, has not said whether the pilot would keep his job.
“Flexjet adheres to the highest safety standards and we are conducting a thorough investigation,” the company said in a statement “Any action to rectify and ensure the highest safety standards will be taken.”
National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy spoke about the incident on Fox News Wednesday morning. She said the Flexjet crew had been instructed to “line up and wait and hold short of runway 31C, which Southwest was landing on, and they failed to do so.”
But she said there was still a lot of information to collect. “We want to know what was going on in the cockpit of that airplane. We will collect air traffic control communications. We have asked for the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from Flexjet,” she said.
The latest incident comes as air traffic safety has been thrust into the spotlight early in President Trump’s term, after the January deadly mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport.
The crash killed 67 people on board a commercial airliner and military helicopter. The president and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the crash was preventable, casting blame at past hiring practices.
However, air traffic controllers have long argued that low staffing has impacted their ability to safely oversee flight operations, and Democrats say Trump’s moves to cut staff at the Federal Aviation Administration will only increase those dangers.
Duffy pushed back on that criticism on Monday, saying people in “critical safety positions” were kept and that the only people dismissed were those who had been working there for less than a year.
“At FAA, we cut 352 people out of…46,000 people. That’s 0.8 percent of the workforce. These were probationary workers.” Duffy said in an interview with Fox News.
“And not only that, we kept all the critical safety positions, and we actually hired more positions into critical safety, like air traffic controllers,” he added.
