On Monday, Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration will change the term “Notice to Air Missions” back to “Notice to Airmen”—a completely useless change that won’t do anything to stop the spate of deadly plane crashes that’s taken place since Donald Trump took office.
According to the FAA, a NOTAM is, “a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means.” NOTAMs, “concern the establishment, condition, or change of any facility, service, procedure or hazard” in the National Airspace System.
During President Joe Biden’s administration, NOTAMs were renamed to Notice to Air Missions, as not every pilot is a man.
In a column in General Aviation News about the name change at the time, commercial pilot William E. Dubois praised the new term.
“Personally, I think Notices to Air Mission is not only more accurate, but really cool-sounding,” Dubois wrote. “‘I’m not going on a $100 hamburger run, honey, I have an air mission to complete.’ Dare I say for those of us with the Y chromosome, that’s even more masculine? Heck, male pilots might actually start checking them. It’s also handy that it would allow us to update the sensitivity of the language without dumping the acronym NOTAM that we are all used to.”
Nevertheless, Duffy changed the term back to include the antiquated “Airmen” to adhere to Trump’s demand that diversity, equity, and inclusion be erased from the federal government.
“In line with my commitment to restoring sanity to @USDOT, the FAA will resume using the term ‘Notice to Airmen’ instead of ‘Notice to Air Missions,'” Duffy wrote in a post on X. “Also, pilot charts will now reference the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Thanks to President Trump, we are taking back our language, our history, and our country.”
Duffy made the announcement the same day yet another deadly aircraft accident took place in the United States, this time between two private jets in Scottsdale, Arizona. The accident left one person dead and three others injured, according to CNN.
The collision was the fourth deadly aircraft accident in the U.S. in the span of two weeks: there was the midair collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people, a medevac jet that crashed in Philadelphia that killed seven people, and a commuter flight crash in Alaska that killed 10.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mocked Duffy for making the name change.
“So after promising to focus on safety, they’ve gotten right down to work … on gender terminology?” Buttigieg wrote in a post on X.
Maybe Duffy should’ve taken a lesson from fellow Republican Ted Cruz, who in a Senate hearing on air traffic control systems and safety in December said the government should update the actual NOTAM system rather than changing the name of it.
“The most recent change to NOTAM was when the Biden administration changed Notice to Airmen to Notice to Air Missions,” Cruz said at the time. “I think the American people would have preferred the administration focus on modernizing the antiquated system over obsessing on gendered language.”
It appears gendered language is important to Republicans, assuming the gendered language is about men.
