maybe you want to keep those seat belts fastened. the lead starts right now. major questions raised today about your safety in the air as senators grill the faa why the agency cannot be so sure there will not be more runway near misses and grounded flights. plus, nikki haley officially kicks off her 2024 campaign, bringing a pledge to bring in a new generation of leadership. but how long can she maintain this delicate dance, throwing subtle shade at trump while not alienating his supporters? and hayashi, you know, that first flying object shot down, the one that was deemed a chinese spy balloon. u.s. intel says maybe it wasn t supposed to be over the continental u.s. after all. welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper. we start with our politics lead and the airport chaos taking over capitol hill after the series of near collisions and the nationwide ground stop that led to thousands of delayed and canceled flights. the acting head of the federal aviation administration
confirmation. let s urn to another issue i know is important to you as an alaskan. the chinese spy balloon. yeah. the senate got a classified briefing on china in the last hour. do you think president biden handled this correctly, both the spy balloon and also the three subsequent aircraft had that have been shot down from the sky? the first thing you mentioned in alaska. the first thing i want to do is a shout-out to the alaska air forces, national guard. think about what they ve done in the last ten days. they tracked this big balloon. they went and intercepted it. they tracked these smaller radar signatures of objects. they went and intercepted those, shot two of those down, the one over alaska, the one over canada. those were alaskan base forces that shot the canadian one. and just yesterday they intercepted a bear bomb we are two fighter escorts that was trying to get into alaska.
what stood out to you. it was exactly as we anticipated. it was limited. it was specifically targeted. limited to the production of chemical weapons. that went pretty much by the book as anticipated. i think the things that stood out to me, a couple of thing, the variety of locations and the weapons platforms and weapons that were used. i mean, the u.s. threw everything at these three sites. they launched from three different from water from three different angles, from the sea, from under the sea, from bombers, with fighter escorts. we saw everything. including the use of a missile that hasn t been used in combat called a jassm a joint air to surface missile that s a stealth missile, a cruise missile that was designed for something like air war far against a high encompetition like china. not necessarily for static sites like this. so i think the u.s. made a point to show that these, you know, famously strong air defenses
any thing from the pentagon what their response would be? in the past the pentagon has always tried to stress the three allies involved here, japan, south korea and the u.s. almost every response has been to make sure to include assets from all three, whether that s fighter escorts, bringing in bombers from guam, flying them right up to north korea s border or in some case having south korea fire rockets the exact they fired them in the ocean, but the distance matters and the distance they fire them into the ocean is the exact distance from those launchers to pyongyang, the capital of north korea. so look for that kind of response. but i don t think they ll formalize that until there actually is a test. and then of course they need to ascertain whether or not the threat is a test, right. the first thing that happens within minutes of a launch. they see this missile going up in the air and they make the decision whether or not to shoot it down. because within minutes, they ll have
incredibly isolated. i think that the president s rhetoric has backed them into a corner diplomatically with china, the main backer. i think genuinely, they believe that a u.s. strike on the and in previous legislations i don t think that they thought that was a possibility. that is good for us and the president. i thought it was interesting that they referenced bombers, me that they think somebody is coming after their nuclear facility, because they could easily say that we are going to target the u.s. and its allies in the past before, or it could say that they could just off the shore in the sea of japan. action over the weekend from what i understand the u.s. flew some bombers along with fighter escorts, and it was the furthest point north of the korean militarized owned by any such what is the significance of tha