The sky was full of cloud, the briefing room was full of biscuits, and I was full of opinions.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – The flight lesson was cancelled before breakfast, which is the polite way of saying the sky had made its decision and was not taking questions. I got the text at seven: “Weather hold. Come anyway, bring biscuits.” In this part of the world, a low ceiling and a damp runway are not a catastrophe. They are an invitation to sit down.
Briefing Room: Biscuits and Low Cloud
The flying club meets in a long, cluttered room with a kettle, a wall of faded maps and a framed photograph of a plane that nobody will name. Our instructor, a brisk woman called Dolores who talks in short sentences like a teleprinter, looked at the grey outside and said, “Not today.” Then she looked at the biscuits and said, “Possibly later.”
I should be honest about my place in this hobby. I fly light aircraft the way some people take up pottery: gently, with a lot of supervision, and mostly to prove I can be trusted with something that has a handle. I am not going to explain any of the flying here, because I am a student of history and not an expert, and because Dolores would be cross. What I will say is that the whole business rests on a long chain of people I will never meet, sitting in dark rooms with headsets, keeping everyone apart.
The News Over Tea
Which brings me to what the club’s retired navigator, Mr. Boudreaux, read aloud from his phone at half past nine. The FAA, in its own announcement of record controller trainee hiring, says it hired 2,235 air traffic controller trainees in fiscal year 2026, the most in its history, and that it exceeded its goal for the year.
The release also says a gamer-focused recruiting campaign drew more than 12,000 qualified applicants in 24 hours, that the FAA expanded training at its academy, and that more than 1,300 trainees have graduated from the academy so far this fiscal year. The Administrator, Bryan Bedford, called it “an important milestone, but it’s not the finish line.” The Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, has an effort that the agency says is on track to hire at least 8,900 new trainees through 2028. A political blog’s write-up, the Legal Insurrection piece on the 2,235 hires, adds that the plan sets goals of 2,300 for 2027 and 2,400 for 2028.
Mr. Boudreaux took off his glasses, which is what he does before he says anything of consequence. “Trainees,” he said. “Not controllers. A trainee is a person with a future.” The room considered that. It struck me as the kindest possible thing to say about a number.
A Fair Point About Hiring and Training
I want to be even-handed about this, because it is the sort of story that people on both sides can fold into a flag. A record is a record. But the FAA itself says the goal is only a milestone, and anyone who has queued at an airport knows that the distance between hiring and a fully qualified person in a chair is long, with homework. The proof will be in the delay boards, not the press release. I’d like to be told in a year how many of those trainees became fully fledged, and how many of us got home on time.
Here, for the record, are the three things I know about air traffic control:
- It is mostly very calm people being very specific.
- It depends on a workforce that takes years to train, and nobody can speed that up with a slogan.
- If I ever hear a controller laugh over the radio, I will assume the day has gone badly.
Ground School and a Sudden Tomato
With the weather holding us on the ground, Dolores ran an hour of ground school on how to read a forecast, and I wrote the word “front” in my notebook four times and drew a small, angry cloud. I will not give any technical detail. I’ll only say that the idea of reading the sky like a letter from a difficult relative did not strike me as new.
At lunch, Tobias sent me a headline from the farm pages that I could not ignore: Cornell tomatoes can sense shortages. If a tomato can sense a shortage, I told the room, then the tomato is already ahead of most of the committees I have sat on. Mr. Boudreaux said that the tomato would probably also arrive on time. We agreed this was the highest praise available.
Afternoon: The Streetcar, Again
I took the streetcar home through a drizzle so fine it felt personal. It stopped for nine minutes outside a church, where a man was setting out folding chairs for a supper, and I felt the warm, ordinary pull of a city that keeps its people fed. A woman across the aisle held a casserole on her knees as carefully as a pilot holds a clipboard.
I got in, put the kettle on, and wrote in my notebook that on a day when no one flew, a great number of people were nonetheless working very hard to make sure that everyone else could. That seems to me the whole secret of aviation and of church suppers: the part that you can see is always supported by the part that you cannot.
If you fancy a lighter read about words that sound serious, the Cockney rhyming slang pages at The London Prat made me laugh on the hold, and I now cannot hear the phrase “cleared to land” without wanting a proper cup of tea. For more of my daily notes at The London Prat, the door is open and the kettle is on. Bohiney Magazine, naturally, keeps its own ceiling high.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/