An aviation expert explains how the shutdown is hitting airports.
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.
