The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly.

And yet, in roughly that same time period, much about the experience of air travel actually went pretty well: Cancellations in the first half of this year (even with that software outage) were way down from the chaos of 2022, even amidst record-breaking travel days, and last year was by some metrics the safest on record. The Biden administration implemented new requirements for airlines to give passengers refunds for canceled or significantly changed flights and announced a new rule to crack down on airline junk fees. Flights are more affordable than they were decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

An air-travel paradox has emerged. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year, “although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever.” Flying in 2024 is safe and relatively consumer friendly but also quite annoying, especially for the customers unwilling or unable to tack on the perks or upgrades that make it more pleasant. In most economy flying situations, seats are cramped, snacks are expensive, storage space is tight, tensions are high. Airlines are seeing record demand; the TSA is predicting that this week will be the busiest Thanksgiving travel week on record. But staffing shortages persist, adding to inconvenience for fliers.

Many of these frustrations are the fault of individual airlines. But a presidential administration’s approach to consumer welfare can play a meaningful role in the experience of flying (and what happens when things, inevitably, go wrong). Under President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal government pushed to block mergers that it saw as concentrating the industry in a way that might hurt consumers, and generally focused on consumer protections (sometimes to the ire of the industry). The Trump administration will likely take a more “business-friendly” approach, Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst, told me. Former Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, Trump’s pick to replace Buttiegieg as transportation secretary, used to be an airline lobbyist. Meanwhile, Project 2025 (which Trump has denied affiliation with) has identified airline consumer protection as a “problematic area.” And many Trump allies have also harshly criticized Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s approach to antitrust policy. Trump—even if he doesn’t fully undo the regulations introduced under Biden—could curb some of the actions that are currently in motion but have not yet made their way to Congress, Harteveldt predicted.

In his first term, Trump’s administration bailed out the airline industry in the early days of the pandemic. And on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2020, Trump’s Transportation Department quietly announced a new rule that redefined what counted as deceptive practices, to the benefit of airlines over consumers. The airline industry has high hopes for Trump’s next term: Delta’s CEO celebrated the end of an era of “overreach,” and Southwest’s CEO said he is optimistic that the next administration is “maybe a little less aggressive in terms of regulating or rule-making.”

The full scope of Trump’s plans for the airline industry isn’t yet clear, but in a statement announcing his transportation-secretary selection, Trump said that Duffy “will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers.” Aviation officials have expressed concern that clean-fuel programs will be stymied under Trump, who has promised to repeal parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. And another initiative Trump floated during his first term—privatizing air-traffic control—may be revived in his next term (the overworked and sometimes dysfunctional Federal Aviation Administration is presently funded with federal dollars). If air-traffic control does indeed become run by a private company, consumers likely wouldn’t see a big difference in ticket prices, Harteveldt said, but it would be a huge change to the way the travel industry operates.

So much about travel is unpredictable, especially during busy weeks like this one. Will your flight be delayed? Will your boarding area be crowded with “gate lice” trying to skip the line? Will your seat be double-booked, and will the Wi-Fi work? Some of this uncertainty is just the reality of human experience—you could be seated next to a crying baby no matter who is president—but some of the experience will be shaped by the administration’s approach in the next four years. As Trump and his allies attempt to balance the interests of consumers and corporations in a massive, complicated, and closely watched industry, a big question is who will get priority.

Related:

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Today’s News

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire deal, which will take effect tomorrow and pause fighting in the region, President Joe Biden announced. President-Elect Donald Trump said yesterday that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from China. Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump aide, allegedly asked potential nominees for Trump’s second administration to pay him consulting fees if they wanted him to advocate for them to Trump, according to a review by the president-elect’s legal team. Epshteyn has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Americans need to put down the vacuum and get off the tidiness treadmill, Annie Lowrey writes.

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A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

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This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dave Free.

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Watch. Jimmy O. Yang spent years stuck in small, clichéd roles. Now, starring on Interior Chinatown (streaming on Hulu), he’s figuring out who he wants to be.

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As the Swifties and/or Black Friday die-hards among you may know, Taylor Swift is releasing a book this Friday at Target. For The Atlantic’s Books section, I wrote about what Swift’s decision to self-publish means for the publishing industry. Have a great Thanksgiving!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Boeing’s (BA) long, difficult year kicked off with a 737 Max door plug blowout, and now a new part is drawing scrutiny from federal investigators. Reuters reports that the Federal Aviation Administration is looking into problems with the plane’s engines after a pair of bird strikes last year aboard a pair of Southwest…

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The Federal Aviation Administration is investing a close call involving an American Airlines (AAL) flight. The plane came scarily close to hitting a mountain while it was flying out from the largest airport in Hawaii.

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If NASA’s current schedule sticks, the next American president will oversee the first moon landing since the Apollo era and preside over the agency’s plans for sending astronauts deeper into the solar system. Elon Musk, the CEO of the world’s most successful private-spaceflight company, has made clear who he thinks that president should be. This fall, he declared that Kamala Harris would doom humankind to an earthbound existence, whereas Donald Trump would fulfill SpaceX’s founding dream of putting people on Mars. Trump seems equally enthusiastic about Musk’s space plans. “Elon, get those rocket ships going, because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” he said on the campaign trail.

A Trump presidency could push America toward a new era of space travel, and Trump has demonstrated his enthusiasm for space exploration—as president, he created the Space Force. Otherworldly ambitions, though, can come with earthly costs.

The American government is already relying on SpaceX to fly astronauts to space, provide satellite internet for operations across the U.S. military, and help realize its plans to return to the moon. A Trump administration could increase that codependence, further embedding SpaceX—and its CEO—in the framework of American governance. NASA has always used private companies to fulfill its greatest ambitions, but Trump could essentially outsource the imagination driving the future of American spaceflight to Musk.

No matter who is president, Musk will play a role in America’s future in space. NASA has hired SpaceX to develop a version of Starship, its biggest rocket yet, to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of the decade. The agency will also likely rely on the vehicle to make its Mars dreams a reality in the decade after that. SpaceX has launched Starship prototypes steadily over the past year from its South Texas base, and seeks to dramatically increase its annual cadence of test flights, from five to 25. But according to Musk and other company officials, the Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for approving rocket launches, is holding them back from testing Starship and sending commercial payloads into orbit as quickly as they’d like. FAA officials have defended the agency’s process for launch evaluations, saying that SpaceX—whose Starship project is unlike any previous space program—must meet safety requirements before every takeoff.

[Read: What’s standing in Elon Musk’s way?]

A newly reinstalled President Trump, who once asked NASA to hurry up and squeeze in a Mars mission before the end of his first term, would presumably take no issue with a pressure campaign against his own FAA to remove regulations. He could instruct the agency to relax its rules, even give Musk some (official or unofficial) power over it. Trump has promised to instate Musk as the head of a government-efficiency commission. Such an appointment could lead to all sorts of conflicts of interest, and perhaps even unprecedented results. “You have potentially a high-level senior adviser in the person who owns the largest and most capable private space company in the world, with a direct line to the president of the United States, pitching a Mars mission in four years,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, who has written extensively about the politics of America’s moon and Mars efforts, told me. “We don’t have historical examples of that.” (NASA could not make agency officials available for an interview before this story was published.)

Unshackled from the FAA, SpaceX could run dozens of Starship missions in the next few years, which is exactly what NASA needs in order to start dropping astronauts on the moon and beyond (and achieving those feats before rival nations do). Space travel is an itch that the United States, under any president, seems unable to resist scratching. “We do it because we can—and because we probably will not be satisfied until we do,” John Logsdon, a space historian, once told me. Musk has long argued that the future of the human species depends on reaching Mars. Government officials may not use the same vocabulary as Musk, but they have bought into his vision nonetheless. In recent years, former top officials in NASA’s human-spaceflight program have taken jobs at SpaceX.

In the meantime, though, more SpaceX flights—and more power for Musk—could be messy, or even dangerous. As Starship development has quickened in recent years, SpaceX’s rate of worker injuries has outpaced the industry average. Federal and state regulators say that SpaceX has disregarded environmental rules at its launch site in South Texas, violating the Clean Water Act by releasing industrial wastewater during launches. (The company has said that the water is not hazardous.) And perhaps most concerning, where a Trump administration could clear hurdles for SpaceX, it could also embolden the company’s chief executive, a man whose conduct is often questionable at best. Recent reports alleging that Musk engages in regular conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin led NASA’s chief to call for an investigation.

NASA has previously acted in response to comparatively mild Musk antics; in 2018, the agency ordered a review of workplace culture at SpaceX, which was preparing to fly NASA astronauts on a brand-new spacecraft, after Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The Trump administration didn’t stand in the way of that investigation, but that was before Musk became the former president’s No. 1 donor and certified hype man. A Putin-related inquiry under a second Trump administration is unlikely. Trump, who has praised the Russian dictator and refused to vocally support Ukraine, would sooner hop on a three-way phone call with Musk and Putin. Already, with SpaceX’s growing inventory of Starlink internet satellites, Musk has tremendous control over how the world communicates, and has maintained Starlink’s independence from the U.S. government and others. But if President Trump asks Government-Efficiency Adviser Musk to, say, shut off Starlink services over a NATO ally or a nuclear power, one wonders how Musk would react.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

A Harris administration would, of course, approach Musk differently. Musk has publicly mused about why no one has attempted to assassinate Harris and suggested that Harris would order his arrest if she wins the presidency. That’s far-fetched, even if a Harris administration might be less reluctant to investigate the billionaire’s ties to Putin. And no matter who takes the White House, to spurn SpaceX would mean hurting the U.S. space program. Boeing bungled its recent mission to ferry astronauts to the ISS so badly that SpaceX has at least a temporary monopoly over astronaut launches from American soil.

The American space program needs Musk, and he knows it. Without SpaceX, NASA astronauts could fly around the moon a dozen times and never touch down: NASA’s own rocket is supposed to get them into lunar orbit, but Starship is their ride to the surface. That leverage raises a worrying—if unlikely—possibility. Earlier this year, Musk told my colleague Damon Beres that he is willing to accept a Harris presidency, but only “if, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins.” Dreier suggested this hypothetical scenario: “What if Elon Musk just declared SpaceX won’t work with the Harris administration if he considers it illegitimate?” (Musk is certainly laying the groundwork for election denial—it appears to be his primary preoccupation on X these days.) Although such a decision would put SpaceX in breach of various contracts and cause tremendous turmoil, it would also make clear who controls American spaceflight.