Hundreds of flights canceled and thousands of stranded travelers, all thanks to the FAA’s deliberate grounding of a bunch of planes. While the media and politicians will portray this as the heroic FAA trying to keep these dastardly profit-seeking airlines from crashing all their jets and killing passengers and crew (because, ladies and gentlemen, airlines only earn profits if they crash enough planes).

Actually, I see this as a very cynical ploy by the FAA to make a statement of who is boss. The actual safety issues here are quite minor, and Southwest actually was the entity that first found out about the cracks in the paint on one of its jets, and reported it to the FAA, but the FAA says they did not do it quickly enough, hence the $10 million fine, which is about a quarter of the companies net profits last year.

Airlines are hurting under the huge increases in fuel. Airline stocks are in trouble, and so the FAA is making a huge statement: we can destroy you anytime we wish to do so.

This is not a case of the FAA looking for real problems; it is just another government ploy to harass airlines and to harass travelers.