The American aviation industry is functionally shut down at the moment—something that won’t be news, of course, to the 360,000 or so people who follow rapper, reality TV star, and man-on-the-scene reporter Flavor Flav on Bluesky, of course. After all, it was the Public Enemy co-founder—and not, say, CNN—that first began publicizing news of the multi-hour ground stop of all American flights on Friday afternoon; Flav’s remarkably sober, non-nonsense-containing “Nationwide ground stop on all flights in the US,” which he reportedly broadcast from the Atlanta airport, beat CNN’s report on the shutdown by fully 15 minutes.
Flavor Flav being Flavor Flav, he has, admittedly, not followed this frontline reporting up with a deeper dive into the why‘s of the shutdown, instead quickly reposting a link to his Flavor Flav-branded Christmas sweaters alongside a note that “Today is the last day of the worst mercury in retrograde AND it’s Friday the 13th.” But we still can’t deny the man’s sense of timing (an issue that those with knowledge of his sartorial choices will know is literally never far from his heart), as his initial reports on the shutdowns reached untold thousands of people within minutes of the shutdown being announced by the Federal Aviation Authority.
As to those why’s, theories are already beginning to circulate. Many people have noted a report from Ars Technica that the stopdown—which has been stated to be “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety” by the FAA, and which is reportedly related to “communication issues” affecting multiple air traffic control centers—arrives just one day after the organization rolled out a nationwide expansion for SMART, an AI tool meant to advise air traffic controllers in managing routes. So it could be a massive coincidence that one day later, the country’s air traffic control system has apparently become so bogged down with communication problems that the entire American aviation industry has been ground to an extraordinarily expensive halt. That’s the wonderful thing about “could”; it encompasses an infinity of possibilities, even ones that seem blatantly naïve. Personally, we’re going to wait to hear what Chuck D thinks about all this.
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