The government shutdown poses a growing threat to the safety of air travel, the leaders of unions for air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants are warning in a letter. “We cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break,” they write. The Federal Aviation Administration’s answer is that there’s nothing to worry about … just like the Transportation Security Administration said its employees weren’t calling out sick at problematic rates right up until it admitted that they really were.
The union leaders stress air traffic control staffing levels, which are “already at a 30-year low and controllers are only able to maintain the system’s efficiency and capacity by working overtime, including 10-hour days and 6-day workweeks at many of our nation’s busiest facilities.” The shutdown has put the brakes on fixing that, with both hiring and training frozen for a job that can take two to four years to train and get certified for. And the shutdown doesn’t just threaten hiring and training: “Almost 20% of [Certified Professional Controllers] are eligible to retire today. There are no options to keep these professionals at work without a paycheck when they can no longer afford to support their families. When they elect to retire, the National Airspace System (NAS) will be crippled.”
That sounds like a real problem in the making. According to the FAA, though, there’s nothing to worry about: “We have not observed any appreciable difference in performance over the last several weeks compared to the same periods during the previous two years.” So don’t worry about your safety in the air being in the hands of an air traffic controller who may have worked 60 hours this week and be worrying about the mortgage! And definitely don’t consider that that FAA statement says only that things have been fine for the last couple weeks, without making any promises about what will happen if there’s a wave of retirements without new air traffic controllers coming on the job quickly enough.