Chapter 1: What are the current issues affecting air travel due to the government shutdown?
You always think flying can't get worse and you are always wrong.
If you have traveled out of Houston's Bush Airport within the last week, please tell me what is actually going on. Who stuck at the airports in three-hour lines just to get through TSA? Child, this is crazy. This is f***ing insane.
Always, always wrong. Tomorrow, the government is going to cut flight capacity at some of the country's busiest airports. Here's the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, and his prediction... You will see mass chaos. You will see mass flight delays. You'll see mass cancellations.
And you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don't have the air traffic controllers. Because no one coming to work, because no one getting paid, because shutdown. Coming up on Today Explained, your flight's been canceled.
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Chapter 2: How is the TSA impacted by the government shutdown?
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Chapter 3: What challenges are air traffic controllers facing during the shutdown?
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Today Explained. We hope you enjoy your flight.
Please prepare for takeoff. My name's Daryl Campbell. I'm an aviation safety writer for The Verge, and I also wrote the book Fatal Abstraction. Tell us broadly, what is going on in American airports right now?
Chapter 4: What are the consequences of fewer air traffic controllers on flight safety?
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 transportation security agency or TSA officers haven't been paid since at the very least the middle of October, if not more.
They want you there and they don't care what you have to sacrifice to get there. It's one thing to say, like, you know, people's mortgages and rents are due, which they are.
People have already missed other payments. So this is just the biggest one. And that's a huge impact because a lot of these TSOs are coming in. They have to pay for gas. They have to pay for child care.
I am a mother of five. I'm a grandmother of two. I run a single parent household, so it's hard. It's hard enough just going to work. Now when you're at it and not getting paid, that's when you just like multiply the level of pressure.
And they just can't afford to go into a job that's not paying them.
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Chapter 5: How does the government shutdown affect flight cancellations and delays?
So you'll see things like the number of lanes being shut down or TSA pre-check not being available. At Bush Airport, only TSA checkpoints at terminals A and E are open. At Hobby Airport, fewer screening lanes are open with wait times exceeding over an hour.
I've been here for four hours. My feet hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurts. I'm very tired.
The other thing is that the air traffic controllers, so the people who tell airplanes where to go and when to land and really just try to avoid any possibility of a collision or violent maneuvering because people have to take evasive action or anything like that. those people also aren't getting paid.
And that means that there are fewer people coming in and you're seeing these huge delays where either airports can't handle the planned volume of traffic, or in some cases, some airports are operating their control towers or their air traffic control facilities with not enough people at all.
In Orlando last night, the FAA warned that the airport was close to turning away arriving flights altogether due to staffing issues. At 415 Western Time, the control tower here at Hollywood Burbank Airport will be unmanned.
There are no controllers who will be on the job starting in less than 15 minutes due to that government shutdown. There's already been a brush with disaster.
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Chapter 6: What historical context is relevant to the current government shutdown?
A Delta flight with 300 passengers was 125 feet from landing in Boston, just as a commuter plane was taking off from an intersecting runway. So it's really starting to have a huge impact in just delays and cancellations. OK, this is what you've just told me is terrifying.
It is also understandable if people have not been paid since October for doing a job like air traffic controller, which is a very, very important job. So let's start with the air traffic controllers. How are they responding to this? What have they been doing? So what we're seeing is just a lot of air traffic controllers calling in sick or being unable to come into work.
We are continuing to see spotty staffing issues at air traffic control facilities across the country. The three New York City airports have been especially hard hit, and the FAA says on Friday those facilities saw nearly 80 percent of controllers call out. 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. So 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.
Chapter 7: How might public opinion influence the resolution of the shutdown?
And this past weekend was the worst for controller staffing since the shutdown began. Ground stops all over the country because if you don't have these controllers, you have to slow down the air traffic to keep the skies safe. It's not just one airplane that gets delayed.
It's also the people who are supposed to be on the next flight because the airplane was supposed to be in another city and another one. Some of these smaller airplanes, like a 737, like you might fly on Southwest, do five or six trips in a day. And so when the first one gets disrupted, that means all five or six are also disrupted and it just kind of cascades throughout the system.
OK, so calling in sick is very effective in terms of the air traffic controllers saying, hey, guys, without us, you're kind of screwed. We talked to you earlier this year about there already being a ton of discontent among air traffic controllers. What has been happening with them?
Essentially, the FAA as a government agency is always trying to fight for scraps on the budget, and it just does not have the amount of money available to hire enough people and to maintain a lot of these facilities that are in some cases 30 or 40 years old.
So there's already this background of limited staffing and budget that's causing radar systems to go out and satellite tracking to be unavailable for long periods of time. Earlier this year, we were talking about what was happening at Newark. Controllers there lost both radio communications and a picture on their radar scopes. Our scopes just went black again.
If you care about this, contact the airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix it.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential long-term effects of this shutdown on air travel?
You're literally in the middle of the day and your systems go out and you cannot see an airplane that's coming in. So you just basically lose track of it. And so that's that's just what's happening before any of the shutdown stuff.
Now, if you think about the stress normally at air traffic control and just sort of the amount of concentration that it takes to do that job well, when you layer on top of that, gosh, I haven't been paid in three or four weeks. Today was payday and we collected a $0 paycheck. Do I put food on the table? Do I pay gas? Do I pay my electric bill? Something has to give somewhere.
That just creates an even higher level of stress. So consequently, people are totally justified in taking leave to deal with the stress of the job. And then I think on top of that, people are also using their bank's PTO as kind of a protest to say, hey, this is really not fair. And if I'm not getting paid, then I shouldn't really be expected to do this.
So I think we're also seeing a little bit of that. OK, so that's the air traffic controllers. There's also, as you said, 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. So an average annual salary of $30,000 to $40,000. And if you're living in a high cost of living area like L.A.
or New York or Washington, D.C., I mean, you really don't have a lot of margins there. I was talking with one TSA officer named Johnny Jones. He's here in Dallas where I live. And he was saying that, you know, put yourself in the mind of these TSOs. They got less than two weeks notice that this government shutdown was even happening.
They're still scheduled out and it costs them, you know, $10 to between gas tolls just to get to their job. If they've also got to worry about childcare or, you know, 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 second jobs, and so maybe they have to prioritize that one.
And I think that's happening in a much larger scale than it is for air traffic controllers because, again, there's less sort of margin of safety in terms of finances and the fact that just a lot of them have this second job backup, so they just kind of switch between the two.
But it's really, I mean, I was talking with some people who said there were hundreds of TSA agents who were calling out sick, and that's why we're seeing, like, Houston had, I think, a two or three hour security line. You're seeing the same thing at Newark, places like that. All right. 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, let's call it. That's a lot of security theater. Yeah. Yeah. You know, people are not smuggling bombs on the airports. Nobody's going to 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.
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