Due to the longest shutdown of the federal government in American history, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced this week that he will be reducing the total number of flights by 10 percent at 40 major airports. The move begins on Friday morning, and will impact roughly 3,500 to 4,000 flights daily.
“This is proactive,” Duffy said in a news conference. “We don’t want the horse out of the barn and then [to] look back and say there were issues we could have taken that we didn’t. So we are going to proactively make decisions that keep the space, the airspace safe.”
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Bryan Bedford said that the FAA will be meeting with leaders in the airline community to craft a plan for moving forward with the reductions.
“As we slice the data more granularly, we are seeing pressures build in a way that we don’t feel, if we allow it to go unchecked, will allow us to continue to tell the public that we operate the safest airline system in the world,” Bedford said.
The move comes after a weekend in which some of the nation’s busiest airports, including in Houston, Texas, saw three-hour waits at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) check-ins. There were also thousands of flights delayed over the weekend, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service.
To better understand the impact the government shutdown is having on aviation, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with The Verge’s aviation safety writer Darryl Campbell.
You can read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below, and listen to the full episode of Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
Tell us broadly what is going on in American airports right now.
Well, the government shutdown has really affected a lot of the operational behind-the-scenes that, you may not know what’s going on if you’re on an airplane, but it’s absolutely critical to just the normal functioning of aviation.
The two things that most people will probably experience is, number one, at the security line. A lot of TSA officers haven’t been paid since, at the very least, the middle of October, if not more. And that’s a huge impact because they have to pay for gas, they have to pay for child care and they just can’t afford to go into a job that’s not paying them. So you’ll see things like a number of lanes being shut down or TSA pre-check not being available, and so that’s causing impacts when you first get into the airports.
The other thing is that the air traffic controllers, the people who tell airplanes where to go and when to land and really just try to avoid any possibility of a collision, those people also aren’t getting paid. That means that there are fewer people coming in and you’re seeing these huge delays where airports can’t handle the planned volume of traffic, or in some cases some airports are operating their air traffic control facilities with not enough people at all. So it’s really starting to have a huge impact on delays and cancellations.
What you’ve just told me is terrifying. Let’s start with the air traffic controllers. How are they responding to this? What have they been doing?
What we’re seeing is just a lot of air traffic controllers calling in sick or being unable to come into work. And that usually impacts the level of traffic that can come in. So a single air traffic controller can only handle so many simultaneous flights.
And in places like New York or Dallas or Atlanta where there’s just this huge amount of traffic, you need three, four, five people at a time, even during your lowest periods of volume. When one person calls out, that means that’s a third of your capacity that you just can’t handle. And so that tends to compound. It’s not just one airplane that gets delayed, it’s also the people who are supposed to be on the next flight.
So that’s the air traffic controllers. There’s also TSA agents. They are also calling in sick. Is it the same story?
It’s pretty different. A lot of them make the lowest rung on the salary ladder in the government, an average annual salary of $30,000 to $40,000. And if you’re living in a high cost-of-living area like LA or New York or Washington, DC, you really don’t have a lot of margins.
I was talking with one TSA officer named Johnny Jones. And he was saying, put yourself in the mind of these [officers]. They got less than two weeks notice that this shutdown was even happening. They’re still scheduled out and it costs them $10 between gas [and] tolls just to get to their job; they’ve also gotta worry about child care, or figuring out if their kid’s sick, or something like that.
Maybe they have to go and drive for Uber, or a lot of them have a second job, and so maybe they have to prioritize that one. That’s happening on a much larger scale than it is for air traffic controllers because there’s less margin of safety in terms of finances and the fact that a lot of them have this second job backup, so they just switch between the two.
So TSA agents calling in sick leads to longer lines. That’s a pain in the butt for everybody. What are the risks if they are not there?
There’s a big portion of the TSA experience that’s a lot of “security theater.”
You know, people are not smuggling bombs in the airports. Nobody’s gonna try and do a 9/11-style attack. And in fact, airlines themselves have done a really good job of just developing tactics to stop the next 9/11. So if you eliminate the TSA, if anyone tried to do another 9/11-style attack, they just wouldn’t be able to because of the policy and the security barriers that airlines have enacted. So I think that’s one big thing.
Now there are probably other things, like scanning for people accidentally taking loaded weapons on an airplane — which, I live in Texas, it happens a lot more than you might think — but that’s a potential risk. Or people accidentally taking a lithium battery, or there was one guy at the airport last time who was trying to take a power drill on. So a lot of sort of inconvenience slash minor security things. But I really doubt that getting rid of the TSA would cause the next 9/11.
Now that being said, I think there’s also a level of deterrence that happens, but that’s just a hard thing to quantify.
In terms of the operational impacts though, there are still going to be supervisors and plainclothes cops who could step in and do some of this. In San Francisco, it’s actually not run by the TSA, it’s a private security organization. So you could see something like that happen, but it would still be pretty disruptive.
All right, so after all of this, the shutdown is continuing and the Trump administration says, “We’re going to cut flights at some of the biggest airports in the country.” Darryl, how unprecedented is this? And what does this actually mean for travelers in the next couple of days?
I can’t think of another time that the FAA took such unilateral action across the whole of US airspace since September 11. Usually they’re focused on a specific area or a specific airport, but for them to say a 10 percent cut on all flights across the board, I literally can’t think of anything that’s been like that since 2001.
And for context, they’re expecting about 4,000 cancellations. On a typical day, you’d probably get three to 500. And since the shutdown has started, they’ve been ticking up to about 700 or 800. So this is a huge expansion of the disruption that travelers might face.
A couple of airlines have already kind of tipped their hand as to what’s going to happen. United, American, and Delta have all said international long-haul flights won’t be affected. And really what they’re probably going to do is cancel the flights that are the little tiny airports. So not JFK to LAX or Atlanta to Seattle, but think about things like South Bend to Detroit or El Paso to Love Field. Because if you think about it from an air traffic controller’s perspective, an airplane is an airplane, but the airlines have this huge incentive to keep the cash cow routes, the ones that have a lot of passengers and they invest a lot of money in, going. So you’ll probably see disruption on these smaller regional ones, but it’s TBD right now.
