Multiple US airports experience ground delays due to staffing shortages, FAA advisories show
Multiple U.S. airports were experiencing or expecting ground delays Thursday night due to staffing shortages, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The shows that ground delays were being experienced at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia. The website shows that the average delay was 90 minutes. Delays were expected to last until 12:59 a.m. on Oct. 31.
At Teterboro Airport (TEB) in New Jersey, the average delay as of 9:10 p.m. Thursday, was 346 minutes. The ground delays were expected to last until 1:59 a.m. on Oct. 31, the site shows.
The advisories page also shows that ground delays due to staffing shortages were expected at Orlando International Airport (MCO) in Florida between 10 p.m. ET Thursday and 2:59 a.m. Friday. The average delay as of Thursday night was expected to be 161 minutes.
Earlier, the FAA status page showed Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) in Texas was seeing an average delay of 21 minutes due to staffing shortages, but as of 7:55 p.m. ET Thursday, that advisory was no longer being displayed on the status page.
The advisories for each airport say that all departures are impacted.
For one MCO traveler, the first sign that something was wrong was when he tried to load his ticket.
"At first it was showing me 7:40, then all of a sudden it changed and it couldn't show it anymore," Joseph Gatzby, who was trying to get home to Atlanta, told Orlando sister station WESH.
Then, another issue came when he went to check his bag,
"They were telling me that it's been canceled do to air traffic," He said. "People aren't showing up for work or whatever, which is scary."
Due to the ongoing government shutdown, air traffic controllers missed their paychecks Tuesday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the head of the controllers' union, as of Tuesday, were concerned that flight delays could multiply as increasingly stressed-out controllers call out sick.
Recent absences have led to a number of isolated delays around the country because the FAA was already extremely short on controllers prior to the shutdown. The FAA restricts the number of flights landing and taking off at an airport anytime there is a shortage of controllers to ensure safety.
WESH reports that air traffic controllers said Wednesday between the stress of no pay and staffing shortages, when safety is at risk, there's no choice but to slow things down at the airport.
That means delays, that means ground stops, that means cancellations. Nobody goes to work wanting to delay a flight. Nobody. But nobody also wants to go to work and not get paid," Dan McCabe with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association told WESH.
Their missed paycheck on Tuesday means air traffic controllers have been working weeks without pay. And there isn't an end to the shutdown in sight.
There's no way to predict when or where delays might happen because even a small number of absences can disrupt operations at times. Sometimes the delays are only 30 minutes, but some airports have reported delays more than two hours long — and some have even had to stop all flights temporarily.
So far, most of the delays have been isolated and temporary. Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that normally about 20% of all flights are delayed more than 15 minutes for a variety of reasons.
The data Cirium tracks, as of Tuesday, showed there has not been a dramatic increase in the total number of delays overall since the shutdown began on Oct. 1. Nearly 80% of the flights at a sample of 14 major airports nationwide have still been on time this month.
Duffy and the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association Nick Daniels have continued to emphasize the pressure that controllers are feeling. They say the problems are likely to only get worse the longer the shutdown continues.
“Air traffic controllers have to have 100% of focus 100% of the time,” Daniels said Tuesday at a news conference alongside Duffy at LaGuardia Airport in New York. “And I’m watching air traffic controllers going to work. I’m getting the stories. They’re worried about paying for medicine for their daughter. I got a message from a controller that said, 'I’m running out of money. And if she doesn’t get the medicine she needs, she dies. That’s the end.'”
Duffy said the shutdown is also making it harder for the government to reduce the longstanding shortage of about 3,000 controllers. He said that some students have dropped out of the air traffic controller academy in Oklahoma City, and younger controllers who are still training to do the job might abandon the career because they can't afford to go without pay.
“This shutdown is making it harder for me to accomplish those goals,” Duffy said.
The longer the shutdown continues, the pressure will continue to build on Congress to reach an agreement to reopen the government. During the 35-day shutdown in President Donald Trump's first term, the disruptions to flights across the country contributed to the end of that disruption. But so far, Democrats and Republicans have shown little sign of reaching a deal to fund the government.
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The Associated Press and WESH's LeeAnn Huntoon contributed to this report.
