John Oliver Tackles Air Traffic Control Crisis With FAA Ad Spoof

Back after the Memorial Day weekend break, John Oliver wasted no time soaring through a topic needing urgent attention: the air traffic control crisis that has been looming and ongoing for years due to lack of investment.

Beginning Last Week Tonight, the host made a quip about a 2023 headline concerning a FedEx plane that nearly crashed into a Southwest airliner in Austin.

“Well, that is terrifying! Planes should definitely not be landing on top of each other and I say that knowing that there is a nonzero chance Tom Cruise will hear me and immediately greenlight a new Mission: Impossible to do exactly that himself,” Oliver said. “I am not saying that he is trying to die on camera, I’m just saying the only way Tom Cruise passes away peacefully in his bed is if the bed is being dropped into an active volcano to somehow save the ‘live moviegoing experience.’”

Throughout the episode, Oliver outlined how the U.S. history of aviation has led to the problem, saying, “as with so many things on this show, at least some of the blame lies with Ronald Reagan,” pointing to the 11,000 air traffic controllers the late president fired amid a massive union strike — a number that was never quite recuperated.

From the Federal Aviation Administration’s designation as discretionary spending and not mandatory to low success and recruitment rates, Oliver remarked that the challenging nature of the role itself — and the lack of funding the field receives — is “like Squid Game if the prize of Squid Game was to just keeping doing Squid Game as a job.”

Thus the segment culminated in an ad spoofing a real FAA spot played earlier in the evening, featuring actors H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers), Lauren Adams (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) and Keyla Monterroso Mejia (The Studio) as beleaguered workers. What begins as a seemingly normal advert quickly descends into chaos as the staff deals with bats, bees and broken elevators (all real problems reported by air traffic controllers).

“My father was an air traffic controller, and I feel a real connection with him here at this job, especially because this is the exact same computer he used,” Benjamin’s character remarks as he points to a sticker that reads “Dukakis for President ’88.” “He had to retire because the doctor said he had more ulcer than stomach. What are you gonna do?”

Meanwhile, in a moment parodying the real technology lag in control towers, Mejia’s young worker is shown confused when faced with a floppy disk, opting to put it into the toaster.

“It’s a lot like a video game, except we can never hit pause, there are no extra lives and instead of NPCs, it’s you and your loved ones,” her character says.

As the filming of the parody gets interrupted by power outages (“Dave, one flush, we talked about this!” Benjamin yells out to Howery’s character), Mejia’s plea to her colleagues to return from a photo op — “I’m juggling like seven f—ing flights” — ends the sketch.