NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert offered a solution to government shutdown in leveraging the aviation “travel hell” he says will hit millions by insisting private jets be “grounded” and “rich folks” forced to ride commercial like everyone else.
The argument lands on the 38th day of the government shutdown, just as the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) warns it will slash air traffic by 10 per cent across 40 major markets in shutdown capacity cuts to maintain safety and an already stretched air traffic control workforce.
During a Friday War Notes segment, in a deliberately pointed broadside at America’s elite, Vittert declared: “Do not ground commercial flights packed to the gills with all of us regular Americans. Ground private and corporate jets until the shutdown is over.”
“There are almost 1,000 trackable private jets in the area at any one time,” he argued, citing fleets like NetJets, FlexJet, and VistaJet.
Those jets, Vittert noted, are not side-channel curiosities, they move through the same airspace and take the same federal staff capacity as a commercial aircraft carrying families with children and bags packed for Thanksgiving.
“Dealing with a private jet for an air traffic controller takes just as much work as dealing with a Southwest 737,” he continued. “If you ground all the private jets, the air traffic crisis goes.”
Vittert highlighted that out of the 40 airports hit by FAA cuts, only one – Teterboro – is a private airport. The rest, he said, will hammer the public. The living-large “rich folks”, meanwhile, get preserved first class treatment, uninterrupted.
If those flights were grounded the picture would be different, he argued.
Vittert then levied some striking imagery: “The rich folks would have to give up the cushy seats and privacy to join the crowds of all of us in the TSA lines. No more drinking champagne on a big challenger jet, taking a nap on your Gulfstream. No more limos straight out to the plane sitting right there. Yeah, nope, not gonna happen, sorry! [Mark] Zuckerberg, [Jeff] Bezos and friends would have to wait in TSA lines and stuff their luggage into an overhead compartment, just like the rest of us rather than their normal lives.
This, he said, could potentially alter the course of the ongoing shutdown: “So rather than being on their fancy jets, they would call their senators and complain.”
“Most of those folks are also big political donors,” he said. “So they would call their senators – doesn’t matter which side – and tell them to stop the shutdown so that they could then get back on their jets and stop being with the rest of us: 24 hours, the shutdown would be over.”
“The big shots should face a choice,” he jibed in closing: “Either use their influence with the Senate for good or fly with the rest of us. So think about it. Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez, on your next flight in 26B, they could even make a movie about it.”
Watch above via NewsNation.
The post NewsNation Host Calls for Subjecting Elites To ‘Travel Hell’ To End Shutdown: Ground Private Jets of Big Donor ‘Rich Folks’ first appeared on Mediaite.
