Among air traffic controllers, including those at DCA, “Everybody is down,” says a union leader.(Photo by Al Drago)
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The federal shutdown entered its fourth week Tuesday, bringing the first missed paycheck for air traffic controllers and triggering delays at airports including Atlanta.
An air traffic advisory issued Tuesday morning by the Federal Aviation Administration noted insufficient staffing at facilities including Atlanta TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) and Denver International, the busiest and fourth busiest U.S. airports.
On Monday, the FAA cited staffing shortages and imposed ground delay programs affecting airports in Newark; Dallas and Austin. Austin Airport in Texas and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Monday. Flights in the southeast were delayed earlier because of significant staffing shortages at the Atlanta Terminal Radar Approach Control.
The current shutdown differs from the previous 35-day shutdown of 2018-2019 because “In the last one, as it got towards the end, you could feel the ship was straightening itself out,” said Dan McCabe, southern regional vice president for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. “This one feels like it could just go on forever. ”
With no paychecks on Thursday, “Today is the day it all became real for everybody,” McCabe said Tuesday in an interview. A 20-year controller, he oversees about 3,200 controllers at 60 southern region FAA facilities, including major hubs in Atlanta, Charlotte and Miami.
“It’s the same in Atlanta and Charlotte as it is across the country,” he said. “Everybody is down. Everybody feels a little hopeless. Everybody has their own story of what they can stand. You don’t know where anyone’s break point is.
“The workforce is young,” he said. “A lot have never seen a real shutdown. A lot of them are thinking, ‘I didn’t know this was a thing. They don’t warn you about government shutdowns.’”
Atlanta has four FAA towers – towers at Hartsfield and DeKalb Peachtree, a general aviation airport: Atlanta Tracon, and the Atlanta Center enroute facility. Together, they employ about 600 controllers. The enroute facility sequences aircraft over 129,000 square miles of the Southern United States and is the country’s busiest air traffic facility.
In the southern region, Nashville International Airport has experienced delays because Nashville “has had an extraordinary boom of people and airport growth, and they are extraordinarily short” of controllers, McCabe said.
He has particular concern for potential delays at Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports because South Florida “is an expensive-to-live-in metro area, so those are the facilities you worry about. I have heard stories that people are close to resigning.”
On Tuesday, NACTA President Nick Duffy told reporters at La Guardia Airport that 44% of the flight delays on Sunday, and about 24% of them on Monday, were due to air traffic controller staffing, compared with around 5% of the delays so far this year, according to CNBC.
About 13,000 air traffic controllers and 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers have worked without pay since a budget impasse between Republicans and Democrats began Oct. 1.