US airports and aircraft are “obsolete” and the nation’s air-traffic control system is “totally out of whack,” president Donald Trump said last week in a meeting with the heads of major US airlines.
“We need to rebuild America’s airports,” Trump reportedly told airline officials in the closed-door portion of the meeting.
Trump also bemoaned the lack of high-speed rail service in the US, telling airline officials, “You go to China. You go to Japan, they have fast trains all over. I don’t want to compete with your business, but we don’t have one fast train.”
Trump promised that his plans to roll back business regulations would help the airlines hire more workers and lower their tax burden. “We want the travelling public to have the greatest customer service and with an absolute minimum of delays,” he said.
Trump told the CEOs of United Continental, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines that he heard their complaints about perceived unfair competition from foreign airlines, some of which receive subsidies from their national governments. Trump said he understands that the US carriers are “under pressure from a lot of foreign elements and foreign carriers.”
“At the same time we want to make life good for them also,” he added, according to a report from CNN. “They come with big investments. In many cases they’re investments that are made by their governments. But they are still big investments.”
