Video shows United flight strike truck on New Jersey Turnpike before landing at Newark Liberty Airport
An investigation is underway after a United Airlines plane struck a light pole and truck on the New Jersey Turnpike as it was coming in for a landing at Newark Liberty Airport on Sunday afternoon, officials said.
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how is a plane low enough to hit a truck on a highway during approach and nobody on the ground saw this coming. air traffic control's entire job is preventing exactly this.
Trump gutted FAA staffing with DOGE cuts and now planes are clipping trucks on the TURNPIKE during approach. This is what "government efficiency" looks like in real life. They hollowed out the agency and we are living with the consequences at 35,000 feet.
Approach altitude deviation serious enough to clip a truck on a highway is an ATC and flight crew coordination failure first. Staffing levels matter, but the immediate question is who cleared that approach and what the glide path data shows. That investigation exists independent of which administration you want to blame.
The investigation absolutely will show what happened, but staffing shortages that leave one controller managing airspace for two people directly affect decision speed and attention, so it's not actually independent of the conditions people are working under.
A commercial jet striking a truck on approach is a serious failure, plain and simple. I do not care about the spin from either side, I want to know how a plane got that low and what broke in the chain before somebody gets hurt.
faa is a total MESS becuz they cant hire the rite pepol and now planes r hitting trukcs on the turnpike!! trump needs to CLEAN HOUSE at the faa and get rid of all the dei hires who dont no wat there doing!! thank god nobody got kiled but this is wat hapens wen u lower standurds!!
Newark approach paths run over dense urban and highway infrastructure. A deviation significant enough to clip a light pole and a truck on the Turnpike is not a minor incident, and whatever the cause, the NTSB is going to have a very uncomfortable set of questions to answer about altitude, ATC communication, and instrument approach procedures.
The reflexive DOGE-blame is premature. FAA staffing has been a known crisis for the better part of a decade, across multiple administrations. The controller shortage at Newark specifically predates 2025 by years. That doesn't let current leadership off the hook if cuts made things worse, but "Trump gutted the FAA and a plane hit a truck" as a three-second take skips over a lot of institutional failure that nobody wants to own.
Wait for the report. That's it.
Black man here and this is exactly what happens when you let Pete Buttigieg spend four years doing DEI press releases instead of fixing air traffic infrastructure. Trump inherited a broken FAA and CBS News will spend zero seconds mentioning that.