“What’s the cost of flying with 1985 technology in 2025?” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posed that question at Chicago O’Hare this week, highlighting the stress on the nation’s air traffic control system as the longest government shutdown in U.S. history draws to a close. The Federal Aviation Administration’s requirement to reduce flights at 40 major airports a safety restriction prompted by controller shortages has combined with severe weather systems to cause cascading delays and cancellations nationwide.
More than 1,200 flights were canceled and over 3,600 delayed as of Tuesday night, according to FlightAware. The FAA’s cuts, which began at 4% of daily flights on Nov. 7, increased to 6% Tuesday and were due to rise to 10% by Friday. Airlines and the FAA are now discussing when to roll back those cuts as staffing improves. United Airlines cut around 5% of its Thursday schedule, while Delta and Southwest continued targeted cancellations to meet the FAA requirements.
The technical bottleneck is rooted in staffing. The nation’s air traffic control workforce stood at just under 11,000 fully certified controllers before the shutdown 30% fewer than needed forcing many to work six-day weeks with mandatory overtime. During the shutdown, daily absences spiked, with some facilities seeing 20% to 40% of controllers off duty. The FAA reported 81 staffing “triggers” situations requiring flight restrictions on Saturday but only four by Tuesday, suggesting a tentative rebound. Still, the agency remains short about 2,000 controllers, and the recovery will be uneven.
Becoming a certified controller is a multiyear process, beginning at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City and continuing with supervised on-the-job training. Trainees must meet strict vision, health and psychological standards, and be prepared to handle emergencies from in-flight fires to hijacking reports. The shutdown disrupted this pipeline; some students dropped out, wary of a career vulnerable to unpaid furloughs.
Weather has amplified the disruption. A powerful atmospheric river storm is slamming California, with drenching rain, heavy mountain snow, and winds gusting over 100 mph in the Sierra Nevada. Flooding rain and low visibility are forecast to delay operations at airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while up to a foot of snow could fall on Donner Pass. In the East, lake-effect snow near the Great Lakes and Arctic air as far south as Florida are also making operations difficult at several hubs. These conditions add to the already complex logistical task for airlines to reposition aircraft and crews that have been displaced by FAA-mandated cuts.
Duffy has committed to overhauling the FAA’s technological backbone, replacing the paper flight strips still used in too many towers with digital systems. All functions of managing the skies, he says, will be on one fully digital platform. Radios, radar, telecom, and voice switches will be upgraded from analog to digital. Congress has authorized $12.5 billion, well below the $31.5 billion Duffy says he needs. The work, taking more than three years, would probably be done by private contractors.
Operating complexity is considerable for this FAA mandate. The airlines must cancel flights a week in advance under the mandate, and once a flight is scrubbed, reinstating it is not easy. “It’s not easy to cancel randomly every day on 10% of our schedules and keep preserving those cancellations,” said Eash Sundaram, former JetBlue technology chief. Recovery will require rebalancing aircraft rotations, crew assignments, and gate usage-a process that can take weeks, especially when multiple hubs are hit at the same time. Industry analysts do warn that even if the shutdown were to end right now, its effects would likely spill into the Thanksgiving travel period.
More than 3.5 million passengers have been delayed or had their flights cancelled since Oct. 1, according to Airlines for America. The trade group labeled the situation “not sustainable” with an all-time-high 31 million passengers expected between Nov. 21 and Dec. 1. For now, the FAA makes its decisions based on real-time safety metrics. “When that data changes, we’re going to start taking that down from 6%, maybe we’ll go to four, two, and get back to normal air travel,” Duffy said. But with winter storms brewing on both coasts and the controller workforce still stretched thin, it’s unclear when flight cuts will be lifted.
