Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ – CC BY-SA 2.0

Wisconsin GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany narrowly escaped serious injury or worse when his Beechcraft Bonanza lost power and made a ditched landing on Lake Wausau on Sept. 12. It is good to have the U.S. representative safe after he swam to a sand bar and was rescued.

While we don’t know the cause of the plane crash, this episode, hints at sobering questions about safety. From 2010 through 2024 the U.S. saw no commercial airline deaths exceeding five persons in a single crash annually, as defined in Part 121 of our nation’s aviation code.

This 11-year safety streak was broken in 2025, when two such incidents occurred, and this year we already have another. Now this might only be statistical “noise,” but the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) created chaotic cuts in the federal public........

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