The perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...

Imagine how good the next wake up call will be!

See also Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster: https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...

Agreed. There are a whole bucketload of problems, each one contributing to the staff shortage. The US has problems that other countries don't have (or have less of). It's a long-term organisational issue. None of it is insurmountable, but things need to be done differently, and the politics of that may be insurmountable.

Being an air-traffic controller anywhere in the world is a very intense job at times, and needs a huge amount of proficiency that only a small number of people are capable of doing. Couple that with:

- the FAA expects you to move to where ATCs are needed, so many of the qualified applicants give up when they hear where the posting is. You can't force them to take the job!

- the technology is decades out of date and the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (it's seriously called that) won't roll out until 2028 at the earliest

- Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants

- Regan broke the union in the 1980s

- DOGE indiscriminately decimated the FAA like it did most other government departments

It's very simple.

ECC is well understood and has not been broken over many years.

ML-KEM is new, and hasn't had the same scrutiny as ECC. It's possible that the NSA already knows how to break this, and has chosen not to tell us, and NIST plays the useful idiot.

NIST has played the useful idiot before, when it promoted Dual_EC_DRBG, and the US government paid RSA to make it the default CSPRNG in their crypto libraries for everyone else... but eventually word got out that it's almost certainly an NSA NOBUS special, and everyone started disabling it.

Knowing all that, and planning for a future where quantum computers might defeat ECC -- it's not defeated yet, and nobody knows when in the future that might happen... would you choose:

Option A): encrypt key exchange with ECC and the new unproven algorithm

Option B): throw out ECC and just use the new unproven algorithm

NIST tells you option B is for the best. NIST told you to use Dual_EC_DRBG. W3C adopted EME at the behest of Microsoft, Google and Netflix. Microsoft told you OOXML is a valid international standard you should use instead of OpenDocument (and it just so happens that only one piece of software, made by Microsoft, correctly reads and writes OOXML). So it goes on. Standards organisations are very easily corruptable when its members are allowed to have conflicts of interest and politick and rules-lawyer the organisation into adopting their pet standards.