Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took to “X,” the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to promise the FAA would stop interfering with private humanitarian flights into hurricane-devasted Western North Carolina:
Glad we could address —thanks for engaging.
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) October 4, 2024
The genesis of this story can be found in my colleague Nick Arama’s post, Elon Musk, in Bid to Get Help to Hurricane Victims, Has Unreal Conversation With Pete Buttigieg on X. It started with a report from a SpaceX helicopter crew participating in the volunteer-run search and rescue operation that the FAA, working under FEMA’s direction, was refusing to allow civilian resupply and rescue runs:
SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!
They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of… pic.twitter.com/abpOsfNenF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2024
There is a great effort by some “good” conservatives to pooh-pooh what increasingly looks like an effort by either FEMA or some other party to eliminate civilian volunteers and local rescue and recovery operations (see Joe Biden’s Dawdling in Ordering Federal Troops for Disaster Relief Is Incompetent, Malicious, or Both):
The problem with all the lies and conspiracies about FEMA, etc. is that too many journalists are going to get overwhelmed with those and just stop trying to report the really bureaucratic nonsense that is slowing down rescue and recovery.
For example: North of Greenville, SC,…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 5, 2024
The FAA’s effort to force civilian aircraft out of the area seems to be documented in this NOTAM dated October 1 that closes the critical part of the disaster area to all aircraft except those “UNDER THE DIRECTION OF North Carolina task force 8.” [That is their spelling, not mine.]
A good friend in North Carolina just told me that her husband has a military buddy who was flying, delivering supplies and personnel. The FAA instructed them that they couldn’t land.
He told them to “F off” and said, “If you want me, come and get me on top of the mountain!”
We…
— Sarah Fields (@SarahisCensored) October 4, 2024
Musk doesn’t say what the agreement entails, but anything that keeps a federal agency that won’t do its job from keeping good neighbors trying to do one is welcome. It is too bad that it took calling out Buttigieg’s bureaucratic fight against the hurricane recovery effort to 36 million users of “X” to bring relief to people on the ground in North Carolina.
