Fox News set Donald Trump’s Transport Secretary Sean Duffy up for a healthy dose of on-screen humiliation following yet another hair-raising air travel near-miss.
“Whether big or small, we do a full-scale review,” Duffy told Fox & Friends after a United Airlines flight struck a light pole and a tractor-trailer on approach at Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday afternoon. The incident left the truck’s driver with minor injuries.
“There are lessons learned from every incident, and from those incidents, we take action and reform how we do things,” Duffy said. “Which is why we have the safest skies here in the United States of America,” he added as the network continued to play B-roll of the plane passing terrifyingly close over the New Jersey Turnpike.
Duffy’s tenure as transport secretary has been dogged by a series of horrifying and, at times, fatal aircraft accidents and other travel blunders from literally the day after he assumed office.
The former TV personality joined Trump’s Cabinet on January 28 of last year. On January 29, a passenger jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on approach to Reagan National Airport in D.C., plunging into the Potomac River and killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft.
It was the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in more than twenty years. The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report, released in February of this year, faulted the Federal Aviation Authority for placing a helicopter route dangerously close to the runway approach path and ignoring data showing near misses between helicopters and commercial planes in the area over the previous three years.
Two days after the Potomac collision, a medical evacuation plane crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood, killing all six aboard and two people on the ground. A week after that, a commuter plane went down in Alaska, killing all ten on board. By mid-February, another regional jet had flipped on its back during landing in Toronto, injuring 21.
That April, a sightseeing helicopter broke apart over the Hudson River, killing the pilot and a family of five, and a small private plane crashed in upstate New York, killing all six aboard.
A parade of close calls accompanied those crashes. In late February last year, a jet rolled onto a runway at Chicago Midway without clearance, forcing another aircraft into a last-second go-around.
On May 1, two commercial jets had to abandon their approaches at Reagan National when another Army Black Hawk strayed into their airspace—an incident that exposed how, unnoticed by the FAA, the direct hotline between the Pentagon and civilian air traffic controllers had been severed during construction work.
In July, another commercial flight near Minot, North Dakota, performed what the captain described over the cabin PA as an “aggressive maneuver” to avoid a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber.
The chaos has continued behind the scenes. In late April 2025, the Philadelphia facility that handles Newark’s airspace suffered a string of radar and radio blackouts, including one 90-second outage during which controllers could neither see nor speak to the planes they were guiding.
At least five controllers later went on 45-day trauma leave. Newark was forced to cap arrivals at 28 an hour, and Duffy unveiled a multi-billion-dollar plan to replace the copper telecom lines and 1970s-era radar systems still in use across the network.
Fresh mayhem accompanied October’s government shutdown, itself the longest on record. Controllers were forced to work without pay while the FAA ordered rolling cuts of 4 to 10 percent at 40 of the country’s busiest airports.
In the middle of that mess, on November 4, a cargo jet lost its left engine on takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky and crashed into an industrial complex, killing the three crew and 12 people on the ground.
The new year has offered little reprieve. On March 22, a regional jet landing at LaGuardia in heavy rain struck a Port Authority firefighting truck crossing the runway, killing both pilots in the first fatal accident at the airport in 34 years.
In April, a flight nearly collided with two ground vehicles at Los Angeles International, two other aircraft came within 500 feet of one another over Nashville after a controller directed one straight into the path of the other, and two more were forced to abort course after their approaches into JFK International converged.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Transport for comment.
