Elon Musk, billionaire presidential vizier and de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has long feuded with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an agency that has fined his aerospace company SpaceX while conducting unwelcome oversight. Now, amid an alarming spate of air travel accidents — including a deadly mid-air collision of a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter over Washington, D.C. last month, which President Donald Trump and allies callously tried to blame on cultural diversity — the tech oligarch has said DOGE will lead reforms at the FAA.
That might reassure some people impressed by videos of SpaceX’s rockets, but on Tuesday afternoon, Musk, who did qualify for a private pilot certificate in 2002, seemed baffled by some of the basics of air travel. In a post on X — the misinformation-heavy social media site Musk shaped from the remains of Twitter, after buying the platform for $44 billion in 2022 — supply chain company CEO Ryan Petersen shared a screenshot of the projected flight path of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Houston, which hewed close to the southern U.S. border with Mexico. “Why is this plane not flying in a straight line?” Petersen wondered. Musk replied, “It should be.”
While both men appeared to suggest there was something irregular or suspicious about the flight plan, this was not the case. Planes may take certain less direct routes due to weather, air traffic, or any number of factors. Indeed, Musk’s own private jet has flown on curved trajectories, as captured in screenshots of flight records shared on X by Jack Sweeney, a software engineer who has worked for American Airlines and the aviation consultant UberJets, and famously aroused Musk’s ire by tracking the movements of his private jet with ElonJet, a network of social accounts. (Sweeney has also monitored the flight activity of Taylor Swift, Russian oligarchs, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and his company Ground Control aims to provide “unrestricted air traffic data” to all.) Sweeney posted the flight path that Trump’s plane took from Southern Florida to Texas in November ahead of a SpaceX launch, which for a while hugged the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico instead of tracing a straight line over the body of water.
“There are countless reasons why a flight might not follow a straight path — weather, [Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards] regulations, or optimizing fuel efficiency by following favorable winds,” Sweeney stated on X.
Sweeney tells Rolling Stone that Petersen and Musk appeared to be “jumping to conclusions” to “push a point that our system is outdated, which, there’s definitely things that can be updated.” But, he adds, it’s a complex system currently in place, and “there are reasons things were designed the way they were,” including with established routes in the sky that function as aerial highways. “It takes time for things to get updated properly,” he adds, which it seems that Musk’s DOGE has not taken into account as it seeks to slash away at vital federal agencies, including the FAA.
“That predicted line that is on that picture,” Sweeney says, referring to Petersen’s screenshot, “is usually [navigational] points picked by the dispatchers or the pilot.” He found further flight data that shows the flight route was initially straight but apparently adjusted to avoid turbulence. A longtime engineer at the aeronautical data company ForeFlight, meanwhile, posted several possible optimized route recommendations from San Francisco to Houston that included the southern path shown in the screenshot that Petersen and Musk found so unusual. Scott Manley, a science educator, physicist, and licensed private pilot, offered another potential reason for the curved route between the two cities, which he said adds “about 50 miles, or 12 minutes” to the trip. “The U.S. military has a huge chunk of airspace it randomly closes to let their pilots train or to test new weapons,” he wrote in a post on X, sharing a map screenshot with a circle drawn around an area west of Bakersfield, California.
Musk’s misguided musings on air travel comes as he actively reshapes the FAA, the agency that regulates it.
The tech CEO has been influencing the makeup of the FAA from the start of the new Trump administration. The FAA’s administrator resigned the day of Trump’s inauguration; Musk had publicly demanded his resignation after the FAA fined SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations.
More recently, Musk’s DOGE project directed the firing of hundreds of employees at the FAA. The Trump White House has claimed that none of the workers who were fired were performing safety-critical functions. Musk similarly posted on X: “To the best of our knowledge, no one affecting safety has been fired.”
Rolling Stone has spoken with several current and former FAA workers, who described the vital jobs the fired employees were doing before Musk put them through his proverbial woodchipper. They include: air traffic control support staff; half of the obstacle impact team that studies and identifies hazardous obstacles (like new buildings and cranes) to inform flight paths around the country; lawyers tasked with keeping drunk or reckless pilots out of the skies; an airman certification worker medically clearing pilots to fly.
Amid DOGE’s purge at the FAA, the agency is apparently hiring Musk’s company, SpaceX, to help it manage America’s airspace.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is set to provide its Starlink internet technology to upgrade the information technology networks that support the FAA’s airspace system.
The arrangement, which raised obvious questions about Musk’s conflicts of interest, could upend the FAA’s previous, massive deal with Verizon to perform the same work. Musk, in characteristic fashion, claimed on X, “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.”
Last week, Musk publicly offered SpaceX engineers to the FAA to “help make air travel safer.”
Sweeney notes that this isn’t the first time he’s found Musk to be somewhat unknowledgeable about aeronautics. When Musk contacted him about ElonJet, he says, the SpaceX CEO didn’t understand how he was able to follow the movements of his private plane, and claimed that air traffic control data was “so primitive.”
“He acts like he’s a genius, but he asked me how I was even able to track it,” Sweeney recalls. “He didn’t know that I could directly identify the tail number,” of the jet, he says. “He was like, ‘Are you just looking for the type of plane?’ No, you know, it’s right there.”
And, contrary to Musk’s Silicon Valley tendency to “move fast and break things,” Sweeney says, “sometimes you’ve got to be more careful.”
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