Air Travel at the Breaking Point.
The past three days pushed the system to its limits. Was this about safety? Or politics?
FlightAware’s ever-more-relevant ‘MiseryMap,’ with real-time graphics of flights that are cancelled or subject to major delays. This is the display just now, as I type, at 8pm Eastern time on Sunday, November 9. Today is Day Three of the FAA’s shutdown-era timetable for reducing flights at busy hubs airports. By today, airlines were supposed to have cancelled 4% of their flights to these sites. Next week the cuts are supposed to reach 10%. (JF screenshot)
This post is about how a federal shutdown, if it goes on, would affect air travel, and why it already has had such a sudden, big impact. The topics include the few things we know, the many things we don’t, and the gray zone where we have to guess. I’ll present it Q-and-A style.
As a reminder: We’re more than six weeks into into shutdown rules that have required Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) and TSA staffers to keep reporting for duty as normal—but with no paychecks, until a federal budget is officially approved.
The weeks just ahead include the traditionally busiest travel days of the year, from the US Thanksgiving holidays onward. How will political developments affect air safety and air travel plans? Some guides and guesses.
1) Did the shutdown have anything to do with the latest air disaster, the horrific UPS crash in Louisville?
No.
To be more precise: As of now, there is no apparent reason to suspect any connection, beyond a sad coincidence of timing.
No over-stressed controller, no under-trained or over-scheduled pilot, no communications mixup, no risky decision about weather—none of these or other much-discussed recent aviation perils seems to have played any part in the UPS disaster.
It appears that on takeoff something went badly wrong with the airplane itself, a three-engine MD-11 cargo aircraft, and that the trouble started with one of its engines and the engine’s attachment to the plane’s left wing. Many more details below.1
Here’s the bottom line for now: This tragedy was not about the shutdown. It could have happened anytime, and it appears to be about this specific plane. Which is a familiar workhorse model used around the world for cargo flights, not airline passengers.
2) How big an effect would these planned 10% traffic reductions have?
Early last month, just before the shutdown began, I wrote about what it might mean for the air-traveling public. (That piece is here.) I said that new economic and scheduling stresses on controllers and TSA staffers were not likely to make air travel more dangerous. But they were almost certain to slow everything down. As is happening right now.
There’s a positive side to foreseeable system-wide slowdown. That is because of the aviation-world mantra that when in doubt, you should always take a little extra time. The surest way to expand the margin of safety is to increase the margin of time.
And boy, is the system increasing those margins. Just three days ago, on Thursday, the FAA released its “Emergency Order” mandating reductions in airline traffic at the nation’s busiest and “highest impact” airports. (You can read the order here.) By the very next day, Friday, airline flights were supposed to be cut by 4%. Within a week, the cuts were to go to 10%
Here are three illustrations of how things looked on that first day, two days ago, with the mandated 4% cuts:
-First, the departures board Deb and I saw on Friday evening after practically kissing the ground at National Airport in Washington (DCA), in gratitude that our inbound journey (starting that morning in South Dakota2) had worked out. The red slashes on the board below are all outbound flights that were preemptively cancelled. If you click on the image, you’ll see that most of the rest have multi-hour delays.
-Second, the “MiseryMap” for DCA at just that same time. This map tracks flights in and out of the Washington area (the DCA, IAD, and BWI airports), and shows delays on routes to and from the area. MiseryMaps for almost every city and route look even worse today.
-Third, from the FAA’s invaluable (and still operating) National Airspace System Status page, this sample entry, as I type, about circumstances at Newark airport, EWR. I’ll explain what the lingo means after the image:
The coded language boils down to this: If your flight is headed to Newark, a major hub for both United and FedEx and used by other carriers too, you can count on that flight being at least two hours late. That is because the capacity limits are making inbound flights spend an average of 134 minutes sitting on a taxiway or near a gate at the departure airport, waiting for “flow control” clearance to take off and begin their journey to the New York area.
The same advisory says that planes leaving from Newark should expect more than a one-hour (75 minute) flow-control delay between when they’re ready to go, and when they will be cleared to take off. Again, this is still at the introductory 4% cut level.
This weekend’s delay pattern also highlights the bad side of “being safe by being slow” in today’s airline ecosystem. The modern hub-and-spoke airline model has channeled more and more flights into a shrinking number of hub airports, with a finite number of runways, which can handle a finite number of planes per hour. Thus a flow limit for O’Hare — or Newark, or Atlanta, or Dulles, or even DCA — can disrupt travelers in every part of the country and much of the world.
3) But is this really about keeping us safe?
Everything the MAGA team has said about these limits involves less strain on controllers, and more margin for safety.
Similarly: Everything they’ve said about cuts in university funding involves supposed concern about antisemitism. Everything they’ve said about DOGE-style budget cuts involves a supposed war against wasteful spending. Everything they’ve said about federal troops in American cities involves concern about supposedly runaway crime. And so on.
What about air travel? More and more this looks to me like the FAA version of a MAGA strategy of “intensifying the contradictions.” That is, a decision to make air travel as difficult and disrupted as possible, as a PR weapon in the government-shutdown political war.
Such a disruption is certainly an effect of the way the administration has approached this issue. Under the mantle of air safety, it is applying ham-handed, across-the-board, no-advance-warning ceilings on airline operations. Which just happen to have a very dramatic impact on the routes and airports that US Senators and Representatives headed to Washington, among other people, would be using this week.
The effect is intensified by the administration’s sudden, DOGE-style “shake things up” operational approach—rather than working with airports, airlines, controllers, and others to plan and smooth a response to a challenge now six weeks in gestation. A planned response could include, for example, greater limits on private jet traffic, which consumes the same ATC time and attention for a plane carrying a few passengers as for an airliner carrying a few hundred.3
Magnifying the discomfort of air travel would would be consistent with some of the administration’s other shutdown strategies. For instance, making conditions as painful as possible for SNAP recipients, or those facing suddenly high health-insurance costs.
But is the MAGA-era FAA forcing airlines to cancel flight because it thinks this can be a weapon in the shutdown wars?
I don’t know. But I can tell you this:
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