An American Airlines flight bound for Boston was forced to abort takeoff at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday morning to avoid another plane that was landing.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it’s investigating what happened. It’s the second such incident at the Washington, DC, airport in the last six weeks.
“An air traffic controller cancelled the takeoff clearance for American Airlines Flight 2134 because another aircraft was cleared to land on an intersecting runway,” the FAA said in a statement about Wednesday’s scare.
And like so many things in modern life, you can lay at least part of the blame on Reagan. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union in order to force them to accept longer hours, lower pay, and brutal shift schedules – look up “The Rattler” sometime, and then realize that the person directing traffic at airport that thousands of people are arriving and departing from every hour probably hasn’t slept for more than a couple hours in the last three days.
Fuck, at least Hitler’s war caused much of the world to industrialize. If I got to go back and kill any one person it would be Reagan, I think. By the numbers I’m positive Reagan’s policies have allowed more people to die and they’ve definitely turned “living” into “surviving” for people so…yea fuck that guy. What a horrible person.
Ronald Reagan: Worse than Hitler.
I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Absent Reagan, the Republican nominee would have been Bush Sr., and he likely would have won in the general – Carter was wildly unpopular due to persistent stagflation, the Iranian oil crisis, and the related hostage crisis. The GOP could have nominated an expired jar of mayonnaise and still won the election, and then done most of the same things anyway – Reagan was infamously more a charismatic figurehead than a technocrat, and visibly going senile in his second term. The conservative cabal moving the levers behind the scene would have been largely the same.
As ever, the Great Man theory of history tends to be more hagiography than fact, and it’s most informative to look at larger socio-cultural trends.