Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is too controversial for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
An air traffic controller with a penchant for NBC’s “The Apprentice” in 2010 had named three navigation points above Palm Beach International Airport DONLD, TRMMP and UFIRD, a reference to the famous catchphrase the real estate mogul employed on his reality show.
But FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told The New York Times on Wednesday that those points would be renamed in the wake of Trump’s disparaging comments about undocumented immigrants.
“In general, the FAA chooses names that are noncontroversial,” spokeswoman Laura Brown said.
Trump, who has been rolling with the punches as business associate after business associate has severed ties with his empire in recent days, told the Times that he didn’t see the FAA move as a great loss.
“‘Making America Great Again’ is far more important to me than an honor I never knew I had … meaning a blip on the radar,” Trump said in a statement provided to the Times by Michael D. Cohen, executive vice president and special counsel at the Trump Organization.
Yet Trump had said it was an “honor” to have the departure points named after him at the time, according to The Palm Beach Post newspaper.
The departure points named after Trump also proved to be controversial among some pilots back then.
“We actually have had reports of people refusing to fly these departures because they are so offended by the fact that Trump has been memorialized,” Paul Agnew, a pilot and then-head of the airport’s advisory committee on airport noise, told the Palm Beach Post.
