The landing gear of a United Airlines jet knocked over a pole that slammed through the windshield of a bakery truck on the New Jersey Turnpike on Sunday, and the man behind the wheel has only a few stitches and a story he would rather not tell.
Warren Boardley, a truck driver from Baltimore, was heading northbound on the turnpike around 2 p.m. when the belly of United Flight 169, a Boeing 767-400 arriving from Venice, Italy, dropped dangerously low.
Dashboard camera video shows the jet’s landing gear appearing inches from Boardley’s window before ripping into his trailer.
Chuck Paterakis, vice president of H&S Bakery, said a tire went through the truck’s window and windshield. Boardley suffered cuts from glass in his arm and hand, was treated at a hospital, and was released.
The light pole struck by the plane also hit a passing Jeep. No one on the plane was hurt. The flight continued, landed, and taxied to the gate with a hole in its underbelly and the pilots unaware of what they had struck until after they parked.
“Upon its final approach into Newark International Airport, United flight 169 came into contact with a light pole. The aircraft landed safely, taxied to the gate normally and no passengers or crew were injured. Our maintenance team is evaluating damage to the aircraft, and we will investigate how this occurred,” said the airline in a statement.
The Port Authority said United flight 169 was on its way to Runway 29 when it hit the pole, causing it to fall on the tractor-trailer, which was traveling south on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This incident is the latest in a string of aviation mishaps that has grown into a crisis of confidence for the flying public, a crisis fed by the Trump administration’s policy decisions that have made flying undeniably more dangerous for a growing number of Americans.
The United close call came on the same weekend that Spirit Airlines, the country’s largest budget carrier, went out of business, stranding thousands and ending 17,000 jobs after the Trump administration refused a $500 million bailout.
It came just days after a small plane crashed in a Wimberley, Texas, neighborhood, killing five pickleball players from Amarillo, and a Beechcraft Bonanza crashed into a Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, residential area shortly after takeoff from Minneapolis’ Crystal Airport, killing two.
They were not statistics.
Michael Bailey, 59, was alone in his Cessna 401B when it crashed between homes in the Grand Oaks subdivision of Wesley Chapel, Florida, on April 19. A neighbor who witnessed the fiery descent called the pilot a hero for steering the twin-engine plane away from occupied houses before impact.
Two days earlier, on April 17, four members of a Huntsville, Alabama, family—James Moffatt, 60, his wife Leasa, 61, and their sons Andrew, 30, and William, 28—died when their Mooney M20P crashed in a wooded area just after takeoff from Union County Airport in South Carolina. The family had stopped to refuel on their way home from North Carolina before the aircraft went down during its initial climb.
On that same Friday, David S. Wade, of Salisbury, Maryland, was killed when the 1987 Mooney M20J he was piloting crashed in a field near Ironton, Ohio. There was no one else aboard.
These lives are part of a deadly arithmetic unfolding under a watchful federal system struggling to keep pace after President Donald Trump and Elon Musk set about remaking it in the image of a private equity buyout.
The upheaval began almost immediately. Within weeks of the new administration, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, who had publicly clashed with Musk over SpaceX safety issues, stepped down, leaving the agency leaderless for nine days.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency then turned its attention to the FAA, firing about 400 employees over a single holiday weekend. While the administration insisted no “critical safety” personnel were cut, the union representing aviation safety specialists said those let go included aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and specialists who updated digital maps that pilots use in flight — workers who directly supported safety inspectors and kept the system running.
“This draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin,” the union president warned.
David Spero, head of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, called the firings “unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month”.
As these cuts took effect, Musk dispatched a team of SpaceX engineers to the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center to evaluate operations and suggest safety upgrades — the same company the FAA has repeatedly investigated and fined for safety violations.
Democrats in Congress decried the arrangement as an “unchecked billionaire’s takeover” of the nation’s aviation regulator, warning that Musk was maneuvering to replace a competitor’s contract with his own Starlink system.
The administration simultaneously pushed for cutting 10% of flights at 40 major airports due to air traffic control shortages, and transportation secretary Sean Duffy proposed a sweeping overhaul that would turn over the nation’s air traffic communications system to Musk’s satellite network.
While all this was happening, the FAA remained more than 3,000 air traffic controllers short of its staffing targets — a gap that existed before the cuts and only widened afterward.
The arithmetic is simple: fewer people watching the skies, an agency hollowed out and handed to a conflicted billionaire, and pilots flying visual approaches short of the runway.
The math ends on a stretch of asphalt in New Jersey, in a backyard in Florida, in a charred field in Ohio. The sum is counted in the dead and those lucky to be living.
The National Transportation Safety Board has already opened an investigation into the United incident and has secured the flight data recorder.
A preliminary report is expected within 30 days. But the root causes are not hard to find.
The pilots were making a circling visual approach to Newark’s Runway 29, the airport’s shortest strip, which begins less than 400 feet from the edge of the turnpike. Typically, the Venice flight lands on 11,000-foot runways, but windy conditions—gusts up to 36 knots—put the pilots on the more difficult 6,725-foot runway.
Wind was a factor, but the plane was simply too low. A former airline captain analyzed the approach and noted that the runway’s PAPI lights provided visual guidance down to the threshold, and the radar altimeter likely counted down to “30” feet or lower at the moment of impact.
“Failure to maintain the correct approach path in challenging conditions,” Litjan wrote on a popular aviation forum. That’s a technical way of saying a plane with 231 people on board came within inches of a catastrophe.
And that catastrophe almost happened inside a system that has been deliberately weakened.
The Trump administration has prioritized deregulation, pushed for cutting 10 percent of flights at 40 busy airports, and at one point threatened to “decertify” all Canadian-made planes in a trade spat—a move that would have grounded thousands of regional jets.
The Transportation Department has delegated more oversight to the airlines themselves, a model that critics say has reduced the FAA’s enforcement presence.
Meanwhile, a shortage of air traffic controllers—roughly 3,000 short nationwide—has overworked those who remain. It is in this context that the NTSB has reported a 61% increase in near-mid-air collisions since 2019.
It is a pattern of deregulation, cost-cutting, and chaos that has made life more dangerous for the men and women who drive this nation’s interstates.
Boardley’s truck was not the only thing that got hit. The light pole the plane struck was estimated to be 86 feet high.
The pilots should have cleared it by at least 30 feet. Instead, they flew below the top of a lamp post. That is the hard, unforgiving arithmetic of the present moment, measured in stitches and inches, measured in the difference between a shattered windshield and a shattered fuselage.
“This could easily have been another fatal accident with major loss of life,” an aviation analyst wrote. The accountability for those responsible needs to be published, not in a press release, but in the record of what happens when the watchdogs are sent home.
The Federal Aviation Administration says the plane sustained minor damage. The NTSB says the flight data recorder will tell the story.
The truth is already out there in the roar of a jet engine that came too close, in the quiet of a family kitchen in Texas that will never be the same, and in the eerie silence of a gate at Newark Airport where a yellow-liveried fleet will no longer park.
The skies over America have become a dangerous place not because of an enemy, but because of a neglect that has been chosen, budgeted, and signed into policy.
In a nation that has long taken the miracle of flight for granted, the bill for that complacency has come due. A truck driver from Baltimore just paid a small part of it in blood and glass.
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