Flight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the United States spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.
If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that flight reductions could reach 20% if the shutdown persists, and on Sunday he predicted a “substantial” number of people in the US would be unable to celebrate the upcoming holidays with their families if the shutdown wasn’t resolved.
“You’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle,” Duffy said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “We have a number of people who want to get home for the holidays. They want to see their family … Listen, many of them are not going to be able to get on an airplane because there are not going to be that many flights that fly if this thing doesn’t open back up.”
The FAA’s requirement for airlines to cut 4% of daily flights at 40 “high-traffic” US airports began on Friday and represented an attempt to ease the mounting pressure on air traffic controllers. Like other federal employees, those controllers have not been paid for weeks amid the government shutdown, which has become the longest in history and reached its 40th day.
“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely,” the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, said earlier this week. He also said that between 20% to 40% of controllers had not been showing up for work over the last several days.
The first round of flight reductions led to around 800 cancellations on Friday and 1,460 on Saturday. As of 9am ET on Sunday, more than 1,000 flights across the US had been cancelled for the day, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
On Sunday, Duffy told CNN that the US is “short air traffic controllers” and that he was “trying to get more air traffic controllers into the towers and be certified, but I am about a 1,000 to 2,000 controllers short”.
Airlines were offering full refunds to customers for canceled flights.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association has warned that the shutdown was worsening the staffing shortages and said that many controllers “are working 10-hour days and six-day workweeks due to the ongoing staffing shortage, all without pay.
“This situation creates substantial distractions for individuals who are already engaged in extremely stressful work,” they said. “The financial and mental strain increases risks within the National Airspace System, making it less safe with each passing day of the shutdown.”
On Saturday, the union said it had delivered 1,600 handwritten letters from members to Congress calling for the shutdown to end.
As the shutdown drags on, Democratic and Republican lawmakers continued to blame each other for the impasse – and for the flight disruptions.
On Friday, the White House blamed Democrats for the cancellations and delays, saying they “are inflicting their man-made catastrophe on Americans just trying to make life-saving medical trips or get home for Thanksgiving”.
On Saturday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, accused the Republicans of “playing games” and said: “Instead of negotiating with Democrats, Republicans would rather let air-traffic controllers go unpaid, they’d rather ground flights, and they’d rather punish travelers.”
For passengers, uncertainty remained about which flights would be canceled, and analysts warned that the disruption would likely intensify and spread beyond air travel if cancellations keep growing and reach into Thanksgiving week.
The moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, asked the Democratic US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, if the shutdown would end before Thanksgiving. “I hope so,” Jeffries said.
Asked the same question by Welker, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said “it absolutely needs to – it needs to open today if we can get it open”.
Rental car companies reported a sharp increase in one-way reservations Friday, and some people simply canceled flights altogether.
Some analysts have pointed out that there was the potential for higher prices in stores, as nearly half of US air freight is shipped in the bellies of passenger aircraft. There is also the possibility of higher shipping costs that get passed on to consumers, and further losses, from tourism to manufacturing, that will ripple through the economy if the slowdown continues.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting
