‘They Were Careless People’: Taking Moments to Tear Down What Has Taken Lifetimes to Create.
The zealots of Doge and Project 2025 are out to ‘cut waste.’ They will certainly cost lives: An example from aviation.
The plush lawn of The Queen’s College, Oxford. As the corny joke goes, a visiting American asks, “How do you get your lawn to look like that?” The British groundskeeper replies, “It’s easy. Just sow it, roll it, mow it—and do that for 400 years.” But what has taken centuries to perfect could be torn up in minutes with a backhoe. That’s essentially what’s happening to America’s carefully built ‘soft infrastructure’ now. Here’s another example from the aviation world. (Photo by John Cairns, Queen’s College site.)
Last week the eminent China scholar Orville Schell likened this moment’s all-fronts Trump-Musk disruption of American institutions to the early years of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao. “Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist,” Schell wrote, “but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness”:
Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.
It is impossible to keep up with the barrage of daily shocks and dislocations. Of course this is by design. The nonstop flow of outrages also makes it easier for members of the quisling Congress to avoid commenting on any of them in particular—for instance, the US siding with Russia and North Korea in a major UN vote this week, and siding against all its traditional allies. By tomorrow, reporters will have something else to ask about.
So let me focus on one dull-sounding development that sooner or later will be killing people. Yes, I could be talking about changes in Medicaid or in vaccine coverage or in cancer research, or about the USAID shutdowns that have already left many people dead overseas. Or lots more.
But instead I’m talking about the sudden attack on part of the invisible infrastructure that has kept air travelers so safe in the skies. Reminder: before last month’s helicopter-airliner collision over the Potomac, the US had gone nearly 16 years without a major airline crash. Through those years, US airlines conducted well over 10 billion passenger-journeys. A total of two people died in US airline accidents through that time. [UPDATE: Just now, as I put up this post, I see news of a potentially catastrophic close-call this morning at Chicago’s Midway airport. More on that as extra info comes in.]
People in the aviation world obsessively read post-crash analyses, to see what was the first link in the “accident chain” that led to a disaster. The first link of future accidents was laid out in the spasm of Executive Orders that Donald Trump glanced at, signed, and held up for the camera in his first days back behind the Resolute Desk.
The institutions I’m talking about didn’t take 400 years to develop, unlike those lawns in England. But they can be plowed up almost as quickly. We won’t notice them until they’re gone. And when we may realize that the “accident chain” for a crash next month or next year was set in motion right now.
Aviation as a ‘marker species’: Systems that work only when many other systems are working too.
Certain animals—frequently amphibians—are seen as indicators of the larger health of an ecosystem. If they’re doing OK, probably so is the system as a whole.
Certain industrial and social structures can have a marker-species function. If a society can sustain them, it means that many other institutions and arrangements must be functioning too. Any country can operate crude steel smelters or grow plantation crops. But to have an advanced biotech industry, or a globally successful university system, or advanced info-tech, a country needs a lot of other physical and social infrastructure.
Aviation, especially aircraft-making, is another of these industrial marker-species. There are only a handful of viable aircraft producers in the world. That’s not a coincidence: Success in this realm is so difficult, and the cost of the smallest error can be so high. To have an Airbus company—or a Boeing in its heyday, or a smaller Embraer or Bombardier—you have to have a lot of other things in working order. After living in China, I wrote a book called China Airborne. Its premise was that China’s decades-long quest—still unsuccessful—to join Airbus and Boeing as a global aerospace power was a microcosm of its strengths and limitations in many other realms.
Why would this be? It is again because of aviation’s marker-species role. To have a successful aircraft industry you need so many other things:
You need advanced-tech manufacturers, who make and assemble the aluminum or composite-structure vehicles into which millions of travelers entrust their fate each day.
You need an educational system that can train and provide enough engineers, pilots, controllers, and maintenance people to sustain these machines and keep innovating in the right ways.
You need a regulatory system to make sure that all the moving parts keep moving in the right direction.1
You need a trusted and independent investigative system, which will scrupulously search for lessons when things inevitably go wrong. The world’s standard-setter in this field has been the NTSB.
You need smooth and routine civil-military coordination, since airliners and fighter planes are sharing the same skies.
You need smooth and routine public-private cooperation, since private businesses large and small are devising many of the breakthroughs in aviation, and producing nearly all of the airlines’ equipment.
You need a precise and reliable weather forecasting system, since bad weather is aviation’s worst enemy.
You need a track record of having done all these things safely for decades, and getting better and better as the years go on.
And you need much more.
Sustaining this combination is really, really hard. None of the advanced economies of Europe can maintain a viable major aircraft industry on its own. Airbus is a collaboration among them. No one willingly buys a Russian airplane. South Korea and Taiwan dominate in many high-tech fields but not aviation. Some Mitsubishi planes from Japan are around but not many. China has learned that entering this industry is harder than criss-crossing the country with high-speed rail.
Everyone complains about US airlines. But the system as a whole, especially its safety record, has been a phenomenal achievement.
I’m sure scientific researchers could offer a parallel list of the miracles of coordination it takes to create a world-leading biotech establishment. Histories of American info-tech dominance have stressed the importance of informal tech-academic-financial networks in the Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and other centers. US dominance in world agriculture is partly due to natural advantages but also decades of coordination among universities, public agencies, food companies, equipment manufacturers, the water-supply infrastructure, shipping companies, immigration policy, and of course farmers themselves.
These are the kinds of institutions most of the world aspires to, and that the US has fostered and improved for more than a century. Today’s Doge version of the Cultural Revolution is tearing down the invisible part of their success: The structures of cooperation and accountability that have made many of these systems go. Let’s return to aviation examples that can start an accident chain.