Good morning, it’s Friday. DID YOU HEAR THAT??? IT’S FRIDAY!!
Sorry, I just wanted to make sure you’re awake.
You all know how I feel about flying. In short: I hate it, viscerally. I am convinced ever single time I get on the plane that this flight will be my last.
I know it’s irrational, and no, exposure therapy hasn’t worked in my case. I’ve flown more this year than perhaps any other time in my life, and it’s still terrifying. Every. Single. Time.
In fact, I’m convinced it gets worse, because I assume I’m rolling the dice – the more you fly, the higher the (extremely low) probability that something on your flight will go horribly wrong.
This is all incredibly ironic, since my husband is now the spokesman for the Albany International Airport. He loves planes. He loves to fly. And now, he loves airports. Go figure. Opposites attract and all that.
Statistically speaking, flying is the safest way to travel. Every day, some 100,000 flights take off across the globe. This includes everything from commercial to private to military aircraft.
When you narrow the field to 90,000 passenger flights a day, that adds up to millions of people taking off and landing from and at destinations all over the world with little to no incident – delays, cancelled flights, lost luggage, and increasingly frequent and intense turbulence notwithstanding.
In the U.S. alone, there are 43,290 daily flights in and out of the country, on average, and approximately 5,000 aircraft criss-crossing the skies at any given moment, according to the FAA.
In other words, the friendly skies are pretty damn crowded – and that doesn’t even start to account for all the other stuff up there – birds, weather balloons, spying apparatus, aliens.
In charge of managing all of this, preventing planes from crashing into one another and keeping everyone safe are the 14,000 air traffic controllers working at many of the FAA’s 700 facilities across the nation.
Aviation safety – or lack thereof – has been in the news quite a bit of late. The FAA itself has found that near-miss accidents – in which planes nearly collide with one another – have increased nearly 25% over the past decade, with about 300 such accidents in the most recent 12-month period for which reports are available.
A New York Times investigation found that these close calls occur much more frequently than what has previously been disclosed, and human error is almost always the cause.
Though there have been no major plane crashes in the U.S. for more than a decade, these safety lapses are concerning, to say the least. The FAA says it is working on the problem, but that’s kind of cold comfort for those of us who will be flying in the near future.
All this aside, being an air traffic controller is a tough, high stress, demanding job. It requires concentration and focus. The hours are long and no one is getting rich doing the job, which might be why people aren’t exactly beating down the federal government’s doors to apply.
Some 3,000 positions are unfilled, and that shows no signs of abating any time soon. You know what that means? Less available flights, higher prices, longer delays. Nothing good, basically. Today is International Day of the Air Traffic Controller, which presents a perfect opportunity to thank the hardworking folks who are keeping our skies safe.
Today won’t be the best day for flying, sadly, as it will be cloudy with periods of rain, kicking of a rather soggy weekend. Temperatures will be in the low 60s.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden declared it is “vital for America’s national security” for Israel and Ukraine to succeed, making the for deepening U.S. involvement in two unpredictable foreign conflicts as he prepared to ask for billions of dollars in military assistance for both.
Biden spoke in a rare prime-time address, following a quick trip to Tel Aviv, where he met with Israeli leaders and discussed the next phase of a counterattack in Gaza that began with an aerial bombardment and may now shift to a risky ground incursion.
“Hamas and Putin represent different threads but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy,” Biden said, referring to the extremists and Russia’s president.
Israel security officials have signaled their readiness to embark on a ground offensive into Gaza that they say will be far more comprehensive and ferocious than any previous conflict with Hamas.
Israel is planning to establish a broad demilitarized zone surrounding the Gaza Strip after completing its impending ground-assault in the Palestinian territory and eradicating Hamas, according to reports.
The Biden administration admitted that it had accidentally outed the identities of several US special operators working to help Israel find and rescue hostages taken by Hamas terrorists.
Biden’s election campaign account on Donald Trump’s Truth Social site now has more followers than the latter’s own campaign account.
House Republicans and their nominee for Speaker, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), ended a marathon day yesterday with no Speaker, no clear path for the Ohio Republican to win the gavel — and even fewer ways out of their conundrum.
Jordan spiked plans to hold a third floor vote on his Speakership bid as more Republicans said they intended to vote against him on the next go-around.
Sidney K. Powell, who spun some of the wildest conspiracy theories about ballot fraud as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team after he lost the 2020 election, pleaded guilty yesterday morning to six misdemeanor counts.
As part of her guilty plea, Powell is admitting her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia. She will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents.
For the first time, prosecutors have the cooperation of someone who was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to remain in office after his election defeat.
Trump’s argument that as a former president he enjoys “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution is sharply refuted by nearly all of American history, special counsel Jack Smith argued.
In a 54-page filing taking on Trump’s sweeping bid to derail the federal criminal case against him over his efforts to upend the results of the 2020 election, Smith’s team cited the prosecution of Aaron Burr, the pardon of Richard Nixon and more.
“He is subject to the federal criminal laws like more than 330 million other Americans, including Members of Congress, federal judges, and everyday citizens,” assistant special counsel James Pearce wrote of Trump.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s father died overnight while she was visiting wartime Israel, with the governor slipping a note grieving her loss into Jerusalem’s Western Wall holy site yesterday.
John “Jack” Courtney, 87, died from a brain hemorrhage in Florida Wednesday night. Courtney, who is Irish Catholic, had previously visited Israel and encouraged his daughter to make this trip.
Continuing a crackdown on cryptocurrency companies, the New York attorney general accused three major players in the digital asset industry of lying to investors and concealing losses in a $1 billion fraud scheme, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday.
The Public Policy Institute of the State of NY (PPI), announced the launch of a significant, seven-figure media ad buy to educate New Yorkers on the economic risks of banning “non-compete” agreements.
New York could become the second state to enforce a ‘Skittles ban’ — after California passed the measure earlier this month.
Tim Pearson, a top adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, precipitated a scuffle with security guards by trying to push his way into a Manhattan migrant shelter, lawyers representing one of the guards said.
Errol Louis: “The NYPD’s shameful ongoing cover-up of the killing of Kawaski Trawick presents a key test for Mayor Adams and his new police commissioner, Eddie Caban.”
Adams ventured out to Long Island this week to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony in honor of Victoria “Vicki” Schneps-Yunis, a longtime friend and New York newspaper magnate.
New York City may soon see some relief from a decades-old rule promising housing to anyone who asks for it — with all sides in an ongoing legal battle over the “right to shelter” mandate agreeing to tone down the rhetoric as they try to reach a compromise.
New York City is embracing artificial intelligence and using it to send robocalls featuring the mayor’s voice in many languages. Adams also introduced a new chat bot he said could eventually be used to field basic questions received on the city’s 311 help line.
The speaker of the New York City Council, Adrienne Adams, announced the latest step in the city’s nearly decade-old push to shutter the Rikers Island jail complex, long regarded as one of the most abhorrent lockups in the country.
A union representing 23,000 faculty members in the City University of New York system is accused of sending out emails to its members promoting anti-Israel rallies using antisemitic language.
An Israeli American professor at Columbia University’s business school slammed his employer in a fiery speech on campus — ripping the university for apparently not publicly denouncing pro-Palestinian student organizations he claimed are “pro-terror.”
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Times Square yesterday evening to demand the release of hostages being held by Hamas.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed that Hamas would be wiped out and that those held captive in Gaza would be rescued during the Times Square rally.
In what has become a familiar paradigm on college campuses around the country since the start of the war in Israel, hundreds of students at New York University faced one another this week in an exchange of chants, accusations and disparagements.
Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron — a one-time member of the militant Black Panther Party — went on an anti-Israel rant at a council meeting yesterday, blaming the Jewish state for the Hamas terror attack that left more than 1,200 dead.
A 28-year-old man was slashed on a Midtown Manhattan train yesterday, a day after a woman was shoved in front of a moving train in the same neighborhood, police said.
Sabir Jones, suspected of shoving a 30-year-old woman onto the subway tracks, was arrested near Penn Station in the New Jersey city. The woman he had shoved was in critical condition.
More than 510 apartments would be permanently offered below market-rate rent in Manhattan — but only if the developer, the Soloviev Group, wins the right to build a casino on a site near the U.N.
The Big Apple has lifted the cap on the number of cars ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft can have on the city’s roads — but there’s one catch, the vehicles must be electric.
The city’s buildings department is set to enforce stricter inspection requirements on thousands of parking garages that might have otherwise avoided review for years, after a deadly cave-in killed a man in Lower Manhattan earlier this year.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan is launching a donation drive at the Archdiocese of New York’s nearly 300 parishes for humanitarian war relief efforts to help Israelis and Palestinians.
Citing logistical challenges and “increased funding needs for core programs,” Equinox, the Capital Region human services nonprofit, has decided to end its delivery of Thanksgiving meals to people in their homes.
State leaders said they would be sending water from regional stockpiles to the city of Watertown after a massive water main break in the Jefferson County city.
Robert J. Putorti, a white judge in Whitehall, N.Y., was removed from the bench yesterday, eight years after pointing a loaded gun at a Black man who appeared in his courtroom, New York’s highest court announced.
The proposed 2024 Rensselaer County budget includes a 10 percent property tax cut, County Executive Steve McLaughlin said.
Ulster County Comptroller March Gallagher filed a lawsuit against County Executive Jen Metzger in an attempt to compel her administration to release documents for the comptroller’s investigation of disgraced former Finance Commissioner Burt Gulnick.
Dutchess County is taking on the cost of operating a program that would allow in-person, supervised visits between parents and children to resume in family court.
A new version of Family Court debuted in Saratoga County this week through a federal grant meant to help people who are undergoing child neglect proceedings while they battle a substance addiction.
Scott Salvadore, of Stillwater, remains the reigning champion of all things business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back after winning the USA Mullet Championship for the second year in a row.
