• Most commercial flights today are faster than they were decades ago, but not always.
• Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said flying from Atlanta to New York actually takes longer today than in the 1950s.
• He said old air traffic control systems are to blame, amid chaos at Newark that's caused mass delays and cancellations.

You wouldn't expect your commercial flight today to take longer than it would've decades ago, but Delta's CEO said that's the case lately for at least one major flight route.

A Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta, where the carrier is headquartered, to LaGuardia airport in New York City takes longer today than it did when the airline began offering the route in the 1950s, Ed Bastian said Thursday on "The Today Show."

Delta typically offers at least a dozen flights daily that originate in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson and arrive in LaGuardia. The shortest of these typically takes around 2 hours and 13 minutes.

"What happens is in order to keep it safe everything gets slowed down at the sign of any kind of risk," he said.

Asked why the flight takes longer today, Bastian responded, "That's the air traffic control system. It's very slow, it's congested but it's not congested; there's plenty of space if you modernize the skies and you can kind of bring greater efficiency."

Key to modernizing the skies would be using satellite technologies and GPS, he said, in addition to updating the radar and radio systems from the 1960s that air traffic controllers are still using.

Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Duffy said in Sunday's interview that he is "concerned about the whole airspace" in the United States because the equipment used by most airports is now outdated.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently spoke about the issue on "Meet the Press," saying he was "concerned about the whole airspace" in the country because of the antiquated equipment.

"The equipment that we use, much of it we can't buy parts for new," Duffy said. "We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down. You're dealing with really old equipment. We're dealing with copper wires, not fiber, not high-speed fiber, and so this is concerning."

Bastian called on additional investment from Congress to fund the modernization.

Another major airport in the New York metropolitan area, Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey, has recently been experiencing mass delays and cancellations affecting thousands of travelers.

"It's slowing everything down, taking stress out of the system," Bastian said of Newark. "Now that's not good in the long run, it's not good for consumers, it's not good for the airport itself but it's the only thing that we have in the meantime."

The airport has seen massive disruptions since late April, caused by a shortage of air traffic control staff, some equipment outages, the closure of the main runway for construction, and rainy weather.

• Tech giants are known for their challenging interviews.
• Google, Meta, and Nvidia top the list of rigorous interviews with multiple rounds and assessments.
• But tough questions show up across industries, according to employee reports on Glassdoor.

It's tough to break into high-paying companies.

Google is notorious for having a demanding interview process. Aside from putting job candidates through assessments, preliminary phone calls, and asking them to complete projects, the company also screens candidates through multiple rounds of interviews.

Typical interview questions range from open-ended behavioral ones like "tell me about a time that you went against the status quo" or "what does being 'Googley' mean to you?" to more technical ones.

At Nvidia, the chipmaking darling of the AI boom, candidates must also pass through rigorous rounds of assessments and interviews. "How would you describe __ technology to a non-technical person?" was a question a candidate interviewing for a job as a senior solutions architect shared on the career site Glassdoor last month. The candidate noted that they didn't receive an offer.

Tech giants top Glassdoor's list of the hardest companies to interview with. But tough questions show up across industries — from luxury carmakers like Rolls-Royce, where a candidate said they were asked to define "a single crystal," to Bacardi, where a market manager who cited a difficult interview, and no offer, recalled being asked, "If you were a cocktail what would you be and why?"

The digital PR agency Reboot Online analyzed Glassdoor data to determine which companies have the most challenging job interviews. They focused on "reputable companies" listed in the top 100 of Forbes' World's Best Employers list and examined 313,000 employee reviews on Glassdoor. For each company, they looked at the average interview difficulty rating as reported on Glassdoor.

Here's a list of the top 90 companies that put candidates through the ringer for a job, according to self-reported reviews on Glassdoor.