Your flights will be canceled

0:00You 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 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.

0:46Because no one coming to work, because no one getting paid, because shutdown. Coming up on Today Explained, your flight's been canceled.

1:00You're welcome.

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1:58Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Today Explained. We hope you enjoy your flight. Please prepare for takeoff. My name is 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? 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.

2:49Oh, they want you there and they don't care what you have to sacrifice to get there. Do I pay for medication? Do I pay for my food? Do I pay for gas to go to work but have nothing to eat that day? 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, you know, 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.

3:27Now 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. 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.

4:13And 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 4.15 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.

4:50There's already been a brush with disaster. 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.

5:34We 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.

6:13And so that tends to compound. 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.

6:51Okay, 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.

7:26So 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 scope ship went black again. If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff. 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.

8:02And 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 zero dollar 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.

8:36And 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.

9:15or New York or Washington, D.C., I mean, you really don't have a lot of margins. 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 child care 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 job.

9:53And 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 are calling out sick. And that's why we're seeing like Houston had, I think, a two or three hour security line seeing the same thing at Newark, places like that. All right. So TSA agents calling in sick leads to longer lines.

10:29That'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. 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. So if you eliminate a 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.

11:09Now, 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, you know, people accidentally taking a lithium battery, or there's one guy at the airport last time was trying to take a power drill on. So a lot of sort of inconvenient slash minor security things. But I really doubt that, you know, getting rid of the TSA would cause the next 9-11. Now, that being said, I think there's also a level of sort of deterrence that happens, but that's just a hard thing to quantify.

11:48In terms of the operational impacts, though, I mean, 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. Daryl, how unprecedented is this? And what does this actually mean for travelers in the next couple of days?

12:25I can't think of another time that the FAA took such unilateral action across the whole of U.S. airspace since September 11th. Wow. 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, you know, can't think of anything that's been like that since 2001. And for context, they're expecting about 4 ,000 cancellations. In a typical day, you'd probably get 300 to 500. And since the shutdown has started, they've been kind of ticking up to about 700 or 800. So this is a huge expansion of the disruption that travelers might face.

13:07So a couple of airlines have already kind of tipped their hand as to what's going to happen. United, American, 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, you know, JFK to LAX or Atlanta to Seattle. But think about things like, you know, 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 kind of cash cow routes, the ones that have a lot of passengers and they sort of invest a lot of money in going.

13:50So you'll probably see disruption on these smaller regional ones. But it's TBD right now.

14:01Daryl Campbell of The Verge. Coming up, believe it or not, once upon a time, American rage over flight chaos was enough to shut down a shutdown. Are we looking at a repeat?

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18:12You're listening to Today Explained. What happens is if you're not paying folks, eventually they don't come to work. Too true, Burgess. Burgess Everett is the Congressional Bureau Chief for Semaphore. And he's here to remind us that there was a government shutdown, the longest in history back in 2019, that ended because of outrage over airports. I mean, it's what happened back then, and it's what's happening now as we're seeing some of these frontline TSA employees not coming to work or air traffic controllers. And that makes it more difficult to get people quickly onto their flights, and that can mess up the whole intricate dance of our nation's flight system.

18:50The 2019 shutdown was a partial shutdown, but that piece of the government, DHS, was not funded, and that's where TSA gets paid from. Right now, we're in a full government shutdown. So we have that element as well, in addition to all the sort of more well-known widespread things like SNAP benefits, military pay, federal worker pay. Was it in 2019, was it Americans saying to the government, hey, we don't feel safe flying? Was there a plane crash? Like, what exactly did happen? Well, I think anecdotally, this is how members of Congress get around. And so they start to notice this. And this is one of the, you know, if you're if you're a senator who's who's busy and going across the country, this is one of the places that you're going to notice the effects of the government shutdown.

19:31I'm very concerned about security. Many TSA agents are calling off sick in order to go work other jobs because they have to put food on the table. They have to meet rent, all of that. There was also, I would say, another piece of that was Republicans were kind of at odds with President Trump over funding the border wall back then. They didn't think it was a realistic ask from him. And they were surprised when he said, I'm not going to sign a funding bill that doesn't fund the border wall. We're in a shutdown because Democrats refuse to fund the border security. They try and make it like it's just about the wall and it is about the wall.

20:06So there was a little bit more disarray, I would say, on the Republican side back during that shutdown. And so as soon as the president was ready to end it, everybody else in the Republican Party was ready to end it, too. The longest shutdown in American history will finally end today, which is great news for 800 ,000 federal workers and millions of Americans who depend on government services. Which is a little different than today. It is. It is a little different than today. Today is a little different. There has been this question throughout this shutdown. Why do the Republicans and President Trump seem less bothered by the shutdown and by all the compounding effects than one might think?

20:51Is this strategy? What's going on? Well, I would say the president has been really creative in lessening the pain in certain areas, like finding ways to pay military workers during the shutdown, which I had heard multiple smart people tell me this was the moment that the government would reopen is because people cannot stomach the military not getting paid. And Trump has made it a little bit less painful by paying them. Truth Social. I'm using my authority as commander-in-chief to direct our secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, to use all available funds to get our troops paid on October 15th. I will not allow the Democrats to hold our military and our entire security of our nation hostage with their dangerous government shutdown.

21:39Now, I think the president's sounding a little bit different right now. He's saying the shutdown's hurting Republicans. I think if you read the pollsters, the shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans. And that was a big factor. And they say that I wasn't on the ballot was the biggest factor. And so I do I do feel like he's acknowledging that it's not good for him politically. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to look at these polls and see that it's hurt. It's it's hurting both parties. But voters are not inordinately blaming the Democrats, as I think Republicans believed they would.

22:11What do we know about the state of negotiations? What is in play at this point? There's been a big thaw over the past seven to 10 days. I think a lot of Democrats are pretty much ready to end it, particularly with the elections behind them, with the November 1st ACA premiums. Now public for everyone to see. They think they've pinned that on the Republicans. And there's a lot more bipartisan talk. The Republicans need to hear what the people are saying because it's clear. They are saying enough is enough. There is nothing left for the Republicans to do but get back to work. The Republicans got to sit down and talk to us about it.

22:55And I agree with Bernie Sanders. The way to solve this is for Trump to sit down with Jeffries and I. It's interesting, though, what is on the table is sort of what's always been on the table, which is a vote on extending these expiring enhanced premium tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. Democrats can kind of pick what they want to have a vote on and get a guarantee from Senate Majority Leader John Thune. And then a new continuing resolution, which is sort of a stopgap bill that would keep the government funded while negotiations on these full year funding bills, which Congress really struggles to pass most of the time, would continue.

23:29So that's kind of what's been on the table for weeks now. I think what has changed is that everybody's sick of the shutdown. The Senate's been in session for seven weeks. These folks want to go home. And now a lot of these key dates are in the rearview mirror. And there's a sense that, OK, it's time to end this thing. So as you said, and as we've covered on the show, the Democrats made this about health care. They said the Republicans are going to raise your premiums. And that's why we're standing our ground. Open enrollment has started. People are seeing those price increases. What do we know about whether or not the public and their thoughts about health care are actually putting pressure on the Republicans to move on this?

24:08Well, I think the Republicans are pretty darn divided on propping up or anything seen as propping up Obamacare. And that's how they view these enhanced subsidies. The COVID era Obamacare subsidy that they're all talking about is supposedly the issue of the day. It was supposed to be related to COVID and it's become a boondoggle. It's a subsidy for insurance companies. But the reality is they've lowered people's premiums. And so when you get a sticker shock type price increase, which we're seeing all across the country, and it's blamed on congressional inaction, like that's not great for Republicans.