As the debt ceiling sucks up all the oxygen in the national political debate, the partial FAA shutdown continues with no progress. Thursday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held a press conference calling for
bipartisan compromise on a clean bill. Often, "compromise" is code for Democrats caving, but in this case it was pretty clear that LaHood was looking at the party he had represented in Congress as the non-compromising culprits.
With not much of a political story to tell about the FAA and air travel not affected on a day-to-day basis, the impact is almost invisible to most of us. But that doesn't mean there isn't a serious impact.
I spoke with Mike MacDonald, a regional vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and himself a laid-off FAA engineer, who said:
The flying public doesn’t get to feel the pain of what’s happening here. People are going to the airport, getting on their planes, and flying where they have to go.
But meanwhile, MacDonald himself reported just having come back from the unemployment office:
Through no fault of our own, we are pawns in this process. That’s so frustrating. I’m typical, I’m a middle-aged guy, I have a mortgage, two kids in college, I have car loans—it’s very, very scary. And it’s over political ideology.
Similarly, on a call Friday morning, Association of Flight Attendants President Veda Shook emphasized that:
This is not some Washington insider game. Real people with real families and real bills to pay are suffering today as a result of this shutdown.
It's not just the human toll on the 4,000 furloughed FAA employees and up to 90,000 workers on construction projects that have been halted, though. Asked about safety concerns, MacDonald was carefully non-alarmist, saying "day to day, the system is safe." But at the same time, he acknowledged that safety upgrades are being delayed and that in the longer term there is some possibility that needed equipment replacement might also be delayed.
The AFA's Shook pointed out that Alaska felt a magnitude 5.3 earthquake yesterday, while one of the construction projects that has been halted is seismic modernization in Anchorage.
It's a measure of their nihilist approach to governance that Republicans have managed to create another crisis big enough to make the effects of the FAA shutdown almost an afterthought.