It should be the best of times for U.S. airlines with a travel boom still going strong, but investors are nervous demand may soften as the economy falters, making it harder to protect profits from soaring costs.
Practical Air Travel Tips During A Government Shutdown
29.09.2023 - 13:21 / forbes.com / Jennifer Homendy
Tick, tick, tick. With just one day before the end of the fiscal year, Congress appears resigned to a federal government shutdown. Should lawmakers fail to pass a funding bill, travelers could feel the impact beginning at midnight on Saturday.
A shutdown will cost the travel economy roughly $140 million per day, according to the U.S. Travel Association. The trade group sponsored a recent Ipsos survey that found six in 10 Americans would cancel trips or avoid flying in the event of a shutdown.
To run smoothly, the U.S. air travel system relies on tens of thousands of federal government employees, including air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers screening bags at security checkpoints. In the event of a shutdown, those government employees are required to work without pay. While they would receive backpay after the shutdown ends, being asked to miss an unknown number of paychecks has in the past triggered large numbers of workers calling in sick and taking personal days.
“On average, the TSA screens 2.5 million passengers per day, exceeding pre-pandemic travel volumes,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday, warning that a shutdown could “potentially leading to significant delays and longer wait times for travelers at airports across the country, based on what occurred during previous shutdowns."
And the longer the shutdown, the longer it will take for all the moving parts to get back up to speed. Take air traffic controllers. If the government shuts down, the FAA’s academy in Oklahoma City that trains new air traffic controllers would suspend its program, leaving roughly 2,600 trainees in limbo at a time when the nation’s air system already faces a shortage of controllers. During the 2018-2019 shutdown, trainees dropped out of the program. “It takes months to get everything started back up. And that’s a big impact on safety,” Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the Nation Transportation Safety Board, said earlier this week at the Regional Airline Association Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C.
If you’re planning a trip in the next few weeks, these tips can help insulate your trip from the worst impacts.
“Statistically your flight is less likely to get canceled the earlier in the day you fly,” says Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and current spokesperson for FlightAware. That’s because on days with a higher-than-normal level of flight delays, there is a domino effect, where one canceled flight leads to a second and then a third. Also, late-day flights get canceled more often because planes never make it to their departure airport.
FlightAware’s “Where is my plane now?” tool can give travelers an early heads-up that a problem
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