If you were planning on travelling within or to or from the US this Spring but are restrained by the financial crisis engendered by the intractable conflict in Washington between the ideologies of those who want to cut spending and taxes and the social safety net and those who are not living in a parallel Randian dystopia of roaming gangs of welfare cheats and steaming sewer grates, there’s a bit of good news.
It turns out that even if after paying the health insurance premiums that make you the laughing stock of the rest of the civilised world and investing your tax reduction in enlightened and self-interested job creation you had enough to fly somewhere you wouldn’t want to anyhow. As part of the austerity measures imposed on it by the suicide pact signed by senate Democrats and Republicans last year as a means to narrowly dodge the wholly artificial debt-ceiling crisis, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is shuttering some 149 control towers and simultaneously giving hundreds of air traffic controllers rolling three-day weekends. There are those who think that this might have some impact on air traffic.
The most positive, happy-clown-on-valium perspective is that there’ll be some delays. While almost certainly true, this view seems to betray a limited grasp of the big picture. Presumably every air traffic controller we have — and will have and until April 7 when this total capitulation to political petulance kicks in — performs some sort of role in the safe and smooth operation of US air traffic. Even if that role is redundant backup, it’s redundant backup that — during an era of lush abundance that afforded the luxury of air safety — somebody who studies these things thought was at least a good idea, if not absolutely necessary. Some things — say taking on a mortgage or selecting a gift for a child — should be planned in crisis mode. Others need to be planned in an environment of ostentatious luxury and the assumption that you’re going to be able to pay for all the silk lining and brass knobs that the dealer offers. Among these things is air traffic control.
Cold comfort is that the closings are limited to small and mid-sized airports, unless of course you happen to be flying into or out of small to mid-sized airports, and in any case the rolling four-day weeks and subsequent manpower shortages apply across the board. More worrying still is the icy sang-froid with which this announcement is delivered from the FAA, which claims that service will be largely unaffected and in any case the towers to be closed only add to the 5000 airports nationwide that already operate without them. In these cases pilots follow existing FAA procedures for underserviced airports and radio each other to negotiate right-of-way.
So the bad news is that there are certainly going to be worse delays than usual this Spring and for as long as it takes a mature and reasoned consensus to be reached in Washington, so in pretty much forever. Let’s hope that’s as bad as the news gets.