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The American commercial-aviation system used to be a modern marvel—but today, the system seems near collapse, David A. Graham argues in The Atlantic Daily. At New York’s LaGuardia Airport, all flights were paused this morning after an Air Canada jet collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of others. Nearly 1,000 flights leave from or arrive at LGA every day. The fatal crash occurred as travelers face hourslong security lines at some major airports, Graham writes. Checkpoints are staffed by the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine’s Day because of a partial government shutdown. “Following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have demanded reforms in exchange for funding the department, and neither they nor Trump have been willing to budge,” Graham writes. “TSA agents, who are not well paid in the first place, have not received paychecks since February, and the situation seems to have hit a breaking point in the past few days.” This morning, reports of smoke in the air-traffic-control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport caused a brief ground stop. Last week, an Alaska Airlines plane nearly crashed into a FedEx plane on a runway at Newark, missing by just 300 to 325 feet. Earlier this month, a Singapore Airlines plane clipped the wing of a Spirit Airlines jet while pushing back from a gate. Last spring, air-traffic controllers lost the ability to track planes at Newark for two brief intervals, causing such stress that some of them took leave. “Each of these situations had its own specific causes, but what unites them is years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction,” Graham continues at the link in our bio. 📸: Spencer Platt / Getty