Scary Safety

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Our Next Flight Just Got A Lot Scarier - August 2025

I’m writing this from a well-worn gate chair at an airport where the carpet has seen more action than a dive bar during spring break. You know the drill – boarding groups being called where “1” is about the ninth segment to be called, the inevitable announcement that the “flight is full” (whether or not it is), and a series of announcements that have become so predictable – begging volunteers to check bags for free – that many people now bring their bags through security just to avoid the fee. Flying is already stressful and stupid. Now add this: the new head of the FAA won’t commit to keeping the 1,500-hour pilot-experience rule that became the post-Colgan safety baseline. That’s not a small tweak – that’s pulling out a Jenga block from the bottom row and acting all surprised when the tower falls – as if it couldn’t be known.

Let’s talk about why that particular rule matters when you’re the person in 22C clutching your personal item. Pilots don’t just learn to fly airplanes – they learn to fly situations. Winter gremlins in Minneapolis. Spring crosswinds in Chicago. Pop-up summer thunderstorms in Florida. Fog that sneaks into San Francisco like a cat. You want the person at the controls to have lived those seasons, not just watched the highlight reel on YouTube. That’s what experience buys you – the thousands of tiny, boring, uneventful choices that keep you alive and keep a non-event from becoming an incident.

And yes, that is exactly what Chesley Sullenberger – Sully as most know him from the Miracle on the Hudson – flagged when he warned that lowering the bar risks turning passengers into “unwitting and unwilling guinea pigs.” This is the captain who was entrusted with 155 souls on a cold morning and suffered a mid-air crisis that killed both engines. Only through his skill, experience, and ingenuity did he save every single one from what would otherwise have been a horrific end (and who knows how many additional casualties on the ground). When the calm guy who by no accident had the skill needed to save everyone raises his voice, we all need to listen.

There’s a narrative out there that relaxing the experience rule will magically fill cockpits and ease pilot shortages. I get the temptation – more pilots, more flights, fewer cancellations, right? Except aviation safety isn’t a lemonade stand where you can water down the pitcher and just pour more cups. The rule came after 50 people died near Buffalo. It wasn’t a think-tank thought experiment – it was the nation saying we won’t let this happen again, and then backing that up with training requirements. Undoing that because it’s inconvenient is the travel equivalent of taking the batteries out of a smoke detector because it chirps.

To be crystal clear, the FAA Administrator isn’t a cartoon villain. He knows airlines, he knows operations, and supporters will tell you he can cut through bureaucracy and modernize the system – which, to be fair, badly needs modernization. ATC upgrades are overdue, staffing is strained, and the whole system has been running hot. But modernization and deregulation are not the same thing. You can install new radar systems without letting manufacturers self-police. You can buy new servers without discounting the value of human experience in the left seat.

Here’s what keeps me up at 36,000 feet. Safety is a chain of defenses – training, procedures, maintenance, oversight, and yes, culture. When leadership telegraphs that experience requirements are “flexible,” culture hears “find a workaround.” And aviation has already paid dearly for convenient workarounds. Boeing’s mess didn’t come from too much adult supervision. It came from not enough. If the signal from the top is fewer guardrails and more “trust us,” brace for turbulence – not the bumpy kind, the systemic kind.

Sully’s statement lands like a hard crosswind because he doesn’t do hot takes. He does math. He’s the guy who turned a river into a runway and then spent the rest of his life advocating for boring, rigorous, unsexy safety. When that person says the FAA’s current leadership “puts the integrity of our aviation safety system at extreme risk,” I don’t shrug and reach for my noise-canceling headphones. I sit up straighter and count exits.

What does this mean for those of us who spend a lot of our lives in airports? Near term – your flight tomorrow isn’t suddenly unsafe. The professionals flying you today met the rules in force today. But policy momentum is real. If experience thresholds slip and oversight thins, the odds don’t fail all at once. They fray. You don’t notice fraying until the day you do – and then it’s the only thing that matters. Think the Titan submersible that made a bunch of successful dives, but no one was paying attention to the installed warning systems telling everyone the structure was cracking. It worked perfectly until it suddenly didn’t. As a society it’s long past time to heed the advice when we receive credible warnings – especially from people like Captain Sullenberger.

I’m not anti-innovation. Bring on advanced simulators, better training pipelines, smarter scheduling, fatigue science, and a modernized ATC backbone that isn’t powered by wishful thinking and dial-up. I’ll cheer every tool that helps pilots accrue better hours – not just more hours. But “better” has never meant “fewer,” and nothing in safety suggests that seasoning is optional. We all know there needs to be more funding to fix the problems, not lower requirements. You can’t DoorDash experience.

If you’re a frequent traveler, here’s the call to action. Pay attention when the FAA signals where it’s headed. When you hear bland phrases like “flexibility” and “reducing regulatory burden,” translate them into plain English and ask the only question that matters: would you put your family on that airplane? Because that’s the metric that’s kept aviation on the right side of history for fifteen years – not shareholder letters, not press releases. One simple, human yardstick.

As for me, I’ll still board. I’ll still stash my bag wheels-in and roll my eyes at the person who pretends Group 3 is Group 1. But I will also keep receipts. If FAA leadership decides that fewer hours and looser oversight are an acceptable trade for convenience, I’ll say the quiet part out loud: convenience is not safety. And the only upgrade I’m shopping for is the one that keeps the metal tube I’m sitting in from becoming a headline. It doesn’t matter if you supported the current U.S. administration or are vehemently against it – all the seats on the plane, from the first row in first class to the last row of coach, share the same outcome if we have another Colgan/Buffalo disaster. We need to keep the 1,500 requirement. We need to keep the promises we made after Buffalo.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!