The Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA ) has amended its charts and terms, including renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, to comply with Donald Trump’s agenda as president of the United States.
Questionable impact
In a statement on February 11, Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, shared that in line with his “commitment to restoring sanity” at the Department of Transportation ( DOT ), the FAA will replace the term Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) with Notice to Airmen (NOTAM).
However, Duffy did not detail how this would positively impact the safety and/or efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS), which has glaring problems, including issues with the NOTAM system itself.
The system experienced two outages, including the most recent one on February 1, over a period of about 12 months. During the most recent outage, the FAA said that the primary NOTAM system was experiencing temporary issues, but there was no impact on the NAS because a backup system was in place. The FAA restored the system on February 2.
“All active NOTAMs were available until the time of the outage. The agency activated its contingency system to supplement and support preflight briefings and continue flight operations.”
On January 11, 2023, the FAA informed affected NAS stakeholders that the NOTAM system was experiencing issues, warning that operations across the NAS had been affected.
In an initial statement after the NOTAM system was restored, the regulator detailed that it traced the outage to a damaged database file without evidence of a cybersecurity breach.
Photo: The Bold Bureau | Shutterstock
“A preliminary FAA review of last week’s outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system determined that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database.”
On February 15, 2023, the DOT issued a statement by Billy Nolen, then acting Administrator of the FAA, which highlighted that one of the two NOTAM systems has relied “on 30-year-old software and architecture.”
“We expect that a significant portion of the modernization work [of the NOTAM system] will be complete by mid-2025.”
Renaming sites
In addition, Duffy said that pilot charts will now reference the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, which are still known in the rest of the world as the Gulf of Mexico and Denali.
In a charting notice the FAA issued on February 10, the regulator detailed that the change was implemented to follow Trump’s executive order titled ‘Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.’
Photo: DOT
In the executive order, which Trump signed on January 20, the day of his inauguration, the President argued that the purpose of the order was “to promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of our American heroes.”
“President McKinley championed tariffs to protect US manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive US industrialization and global reach to new heights.”
On his second day in office on January 29, Duffy immediately implemented a number of changes at the DOT in order to heel to Trump’s agenda “to rescind woke policies, roll back burdensome and costly regulations, restore economic growth,” and ensure the DOT’s policies align with the Administration’s direction.
Related US DOT New Head Announces End To Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policies The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a branch of the DOT, still does not have an Administrator or a Deputy Administrator.
Blaming DEI and woke policies
Throughout his term so far, apart from the fact that the FAA, the daughter agency of the DOT, restricted helicopter traffic around Washington Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) following the mid-air collision between the PSA Airlines Mitsubishi CRJ700 and the US Army (USA) Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, Duffy has continued to focus diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and ‘woke’ policies.
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity – Duffy is a former Fox News host himself – the Secretary of Transportation did not push back on the baseless claims Hannity had made that, during the Biden administration, the FAA’s DEI policies resulted in the hiring of “people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.”
Instead, Duffy claimed that the DOT had strayed away from its focus on safety and instead focused on the environment, electrical vehicles (EV), and changing language for social justice.
“When you do not focus on your systems and safety, bad things happen.”
The CRJ700 , which was operating American Airlines Flight 5342 , collided with the USA UH-60 Black Hawk in the late evening on January 29, claiming the lives of 67 people: 60 passengers and four flight crew members onboard the PSA Airlines CRJ700 and three servicepeople onboard the helicopter.
The allegations based on false pretenses that the FAA hired air traffic controllers (ATC) with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions” were pushed by Trump during a press conference about the CRJ700 and UH-60 Black Hawk mid-air collision on January 30.
Photo: NTSB
Kelly Buckland, the former disability policy adviser at the DOT, told NPR that the FAA would only hire “qualified people with disabilities, with the emphasis on qualified.”
Nevertheless, during the press conference on January 30, when asked how he could conclude that diversity was at fault for the mid-air collision over the Potomac River, Trump responded that he had “common sense.”