Airlines are telling passengers Thursday not to worry too much about pending air-traffic restrictions stemming from the shutdown and ongoing strain on the nation's air traffic controllers. But if you're scheduled to take a shorter, regional flight, you may be impacted.
"Long-haul international flying and our hub-to-hub flying will not be impacted," said United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby in a memo to employees Thursday. He said that the airline would be focusing on "regional flying and domestic mainline flights that do not travel between our hubs" in cutting flight schedules to abide by new FAA restrictions impacting all major airports starting this weekend.
Similarly, Delta Airlines and Southwest Airlines are insisting that "the vast majority" of their flights will not be impacted in the coming days or weeks — even though, as CNN reports, Delta has already canceled 200 flights on Friday.
Delta, United, and American Airlines are all waiving fees for passengers looking to change or cancel their flights.
Alaska Airlines, meanwhile, issued a statement saying that it would preserve its flight routes to smaller and remote communities, and would focus any cuts "on routes with a higher frequency of flights."
United, which is the biggest carrier at SFO, plans to keep flight schedules to its other hubs — Chicago O’Hare, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, and Washington Dulles — unchanged as of now. This means that people looking to get to LA may want to look at United, which won't be treating those hub-to-hub flights as regional connections the way other airlines are likely to.
As we noted here Wednesday, the FAA wants to reduce air traffic into and out of the nation's largest airports by 10% starting Friday, in order to alleviate the strain on air traffic controllers who are working without pay, often in understaffed control towers.
Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, tells CNN that "Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown," and nationwide, the system is short 400 air traffic controllers. This makes the situation different from the last extended shutdown in 2019, when the system was not so short-staffed.
This restriction would theoretically be lifted if and when the shutdown impasse ends between congressional Democrats and Republicans, and it seems likely they will want to avoid an ongoing travel nightmare as we get closer to Thanksgiving week, which is traditionally the biggest travel week of the year.
It looks like we will at least be seeing flights getting canceled and traveler frustrations mounting in the coming days, and this is the next shoe to drop in what is now the longest government shutdown in US history.
And, Daniels told CNN, things aren't going to go back to business as usual for air travel even if the shutdown were to end tomorrow. "It will take us months to come out of all the impacts that it’s causing," Daniels said.
Photo by Justin Hu
