Air Travel During the Shutdown. Do I Need to Worry?

Via FlightAware this morning, the queue of planes being sequenced for landing (blue) or departure (green) at Los Angeles International airport, LAX. All the other planes (white) are headed somewhere else. This represents a relatively slow time for traffic at LAX, mid-morning on a Sunday. (Screen shot on October 5, 2025, from FlightAware.)

Around 13,000 FAA-employed Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) were required to report for work as usual today. They are supposed to keep showing up as long as the government shutdown lasts. But they won’t get their paychecks until the government officially re-opens. The same is true for some 60,000 TSA agents, who staff security checkpoints at commercial airports.

Once the shutdown is over, these “essential” workers will receive their back pay. But their households will have to make do in the meantime.

This situation is obviously terrible and stressful for these aviation-related public employees, among hundreds of thousands of others in the federal workforce. What does it mean for the traveling public?

Here are four quick questions and my answers.

1) Do I need to worry about air safety during the shutdown?

Not more than usual. For now.

I’ve written this a thousand times, so I might as well write it again: The modern US commercial air-travel network remains the safest mode of travel ever devised. Over the past 15 years, fewer than 70 people have been killed in US airline crashes. Nearly twice that many people die every day in crashes on US roads.

The complex web of procedure, trust, collaboration, and accountability that sustains this safety record should be an example to countless other organizations and institutions.¹ At the moment, the opposite is happening. In aviation as in so many areas of long-term US eminence—public health, medical research, higher education, international alliances—the foundations of success are being blasted away.

But for now, the air safety system is still functional.² Anything can happen. But the shutdown leaves the crucial people and procedures in place.

2) Is there any other reason to worry about aviation during the shutdown?

I’d say ‘be patient,’ rather than be worried. Everything about air travel will get slower, the longer the shutdown goes on.

The first and most obvious place this will appear is in TSA clearance lines. As mentioned, both ATCs and TSA staffers must still show up at airport and control centers for work. But the two groups are in different circumstances. Compared with controllers, overall the TSA workforce is younger, less highly educated, and lower paid. More TSA families will face immediate difficulties with their paychecks cut off, as has happened now.

The last time TSA workers (and others) were in this predicament was in 2018-2019, also under Donald Trump. That shutdown lasted a full five weeks. The longer it went on, the higher the absentee rate among TSA staffers. Near the end, some 10% of the expected TSA workforce failed to show up during a holiday travel rush. The TSA itself put out a statement saying that its workers were in financial strain.

If you go to an airport this week, you’ll still see TSA checkpoints, and the security procedures will be the same. But fewer lines will be open, the waits will be longer, and the people you meet will be under more-than-usual strain. The longer the shutdown, the worse these delays will become.

The other source of delay will be less visible to travelers but could have a bigger effect. It will come from shared awareness from people in the aviation system that as stress goes up, the safest approach is to slow things down.

People in this system realize that their work comes with life-and-death stakes. The participants include pilots and controllers but also dispatchers, weather experts, mechanics, ground staff, cabin crews, and others. Through the years they have learned to work together to achieve the fastest possible safe movement of people and aircraft. But under increased stress, or short staffing, they know that extra time can give them an extra margin for safety.

What could this mean, in practice? At America’s busiest airports, controllers and flight crews have refined the science of spacing planes as close together as is safely possible, when they queue up for take-off and landing.³ If things are going smoothly, that allows more airlines to schedule more flights at the peak hours, and gets more people where they’re going on time.

But under stress, the system can protect itself, by creating more leeway. Controllers might slow down inbound planes (like those headed for O’Hare this evening, in the FlightAware image) so they land at 90-second intervals, rather than one per minute. They might tell an outbound plane to “hold short” of a runway and wait two minutes for an inbound plane to land and turn off the runway. Rather than telling that outbound plane, “Cleared for takeoff, no delay, landing traffic on three-mile final.”⁴

There are countless other cues of a system that is running smoothly, versus one that is tense. They add up to make a big difference in schedules and delays.

Times are tense now. So things will move more slowly.

3) But should I worry about safety in the long run?

Yes.

I’ve written about this many times before. For now I’ll just mention a recent conversation with a friend who is one of the true visionaries of modern aviation. He’s been an active pilot since his teenage years. He helped design many of the systems that keep passengers safe. He’s worked in business and in academia and in government. I’ve relied on him for perspective since we first met in the 1990s.

“Predicting when we’ll have the ‘next big crash’ is like predicting the ‘next big earthquake,’ ” he told me. “You know where the fault lines are. You know where the plates are moving and where the pressure is building up. You know that something will have to give. But you have no idea if that will be tomorrow, or ten years from now.”

We know where pressure is building up in commercial aviation. Too few controllers, under too much stress, dealing with too many planes, under too much scheduling and financial pressure, to reach the same number of hub cities all at the same time.⁵ The system has had too many close calls, even before this year’s disaster over the Potomac. Something will have to give.

Read the full article on James Fallow's Substack.