The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

Donald Trump has made good on a promise to slash hordes of workers from the Federal Aviation Administration, despite four deadly air crashes during his short second tenure as president, according to CNN.

A raft of termination emails were reportedly fired off on Friday, with the numbers of probationary employees facing dismissal in the “hundreds,” according to trade union center AFL-CIO.

Hundreds of workers at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have been laid off despite rising concerns about understaffing, as the Trump administration seeks to rein in federal spending.

David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement that several hundred probationary employees were notified Friday evening by messages from an "exec order" Microsoft email address, not an official government email address. The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists is the union that represents the employees. 

The Federal Aviation Administration fired fewer than 400 employees out of its workforce of 45,000, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Monday, as questions rise around air traffic safety amid a spate of recent plane accidents.

Duffy posted the number of layoffs in a social media post message on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to a post by his Democratic predecessor Pete Buttigieg, who has been critical of the Trump administration's Department of Transportation.

A Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis crashed and overturned while landing at Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday afternoon, with photos showing the plane with its belly up on the tarmac.

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into flight data discrepancies, potential altimeter malfunctions and a possible miscommunication with air traffic control in the midair collision of an Army helicopter and a commercial airplane last month in the deadliest U.S. air crash in almost a quarter century. 

“We are looking at the possibility of there may be bad data,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do till we get to that.”

The midair collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter over the nation’s capital was preceded by months of harrowing near misses at airports across America, as well as increasingly shrill warnings that the nation’s air traffic control and safety system is stretched to the limit.