Unions representing Transportation Security Administration employees, air traffic controllers and airline pilots demanded that President Donald Trump and Congress end a 16-day partial government shutdown that has wreaked havoc on air travel.

Airport and airline employees across the country have urged air travelers to arrive hours earlier than usual for flights in light of increased security checkpoint wait times and backed-up lines.  Employees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, for example, told KIRO-TV that several passengers had been left crying outside the gates after they’d waited hours to get through unstaffed security checkpoints—the situation got worse as several TSA employees, who have been working without pay during the shutdown, called in sick.

“It was a huge line, Sea-Tac employee Sarah Burgisser told KIRO-TV. “I think it was just one guy who came to work.”

Pilots and air-traffic controllers are also affected, which has sparked concerns about safety. Controllers were expected to implement a new text messaging system that communicates directly with pilots in the cockpit, but the shutdown has stalled the initiative. If they can’t use the sytem by January 15, expensive retraining sessions will be forced on workers.

The third week of the partial government shutdown prompted Joe DePete, president of Air Line Pilots Association International, to write a January 2 letter to Trump saying that the block on paychecks and services to pilots is threatening the “safety, security and efficiency of our national airspace system.” 

Unions representing TSA workers, air traffic controllers and airline pilots are demanding President Donald Trump and congressional leaders end a 16-day partial government shutdown that is now causing safety and wait time issues. Getty Images SCOTT OLSON/Staff

“The nation’s airspace system is a complex transportation network that involves government and industry partnerships to function properly, and the disruptions being caused by the shutdown are threatening the safe operations of this network,” DePete wrote to Trump last week.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 30,000 workers in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, including TSA employees, told WCPO-TV  it was filing a lawsuit against the federal government. 

“We’re saying it’s against the law to work employees without paying them. These are not slaves. It’s against the law,” Arnold Scott, of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the Cincinnati news station. “The fair labor standards require federal employees be paid for the work that they perform.”

The National Air Traffic Controller Association said the pain of the partial government shutdown was forcing its employees to work long hours without payment. “We are working six days a week. Some are working 10 hours a day, that’s across the country,” said Marc Schneider, president of the association, in an interview with WCPO-TV. “We are at a 30-year low in staffing for air traffic controllers nationwide. The school in Oklahoma City is shut down.”

TSA administrators issued a statement Monday morning rejecting reports of longer-than-average security wait times. The agency reported increased efficiency despite a spike in travel and the government shutdown. TSA’s statement said its employees had screened “approximately 2.22 million passengers Sunday, a historically busy day due to holiday travel; 99.8 percent of passengers waited less than 30 minutes; 90.1 percent of passengers less than 15 minutes.”

But social media posts showed long lines, and passengers who spoke with KIRO-TV in Seattle said unstaffed TSA checkpoints caused passengers to miss flights. TSA spokesman Jim Gregory told The Washington Post “sick outs” or “call outs” had increased at airports, but had had “minimal impact” on the 30-minute average wait time. 

But TSA employee union leaders tell a very different tale. “Fifty to 100 people are calling out at any particular airport,” said Hydrick Thomas, president of the TSA union under the American Federation of Government Employees, in an interview with The Washington Post. “They are not coming to work because they don’t have the money to get to work. They’re not just taking off. They’re not saying, ‘We’re going to shut things down.’ They are the lowest-paid employees in the federal government, and they don’t have the money to get to work.”

One passenger at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Anna Gedstad, in a Sunday tweet, which has since gone viral, that a TSA agent responded to her question about removing her laptop from its case by saying, “I don’t care, I’m not getting paid.” 

Passengers and airline employees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport said longer lines caused by fewer TSA checkpoint workers had caused hundreds to miss their flights Monday.

“Your ticket may say get here three hours early, [but] I say get here five hours early,” said Valante Weems, an employee at Sea-Tac.

Even the TSA’s website was forced to issue a statement acknowledging that the staffing shortage had affected their digital presence. “Due to the lapse in federal funding, this website will not be actively managed. This website was last updated on December 21, 2018, and will not be updated until after funding is enacted. As such, information on this website may not be up to date. Transactions submitted via this website might not be processed, and we will not be able to respond to inquiries until after appropriations are enacted.” 

National airline delay maps showed Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago and New York airports experiencing mild Monday morning delays.

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DENVER, Colorado — If you are planning on hiking in a national park or head to the airport to travel this weekend be prepared. Federal workers are warning that the government shutdown is starting to impact safety.

“For air traffic controllers, you only get one take,” said James Marinitti with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. “They work in a mistake-free environment where we are expected to be right 100 percent of the time.”

With 3,000 air traffic support staff being told not to come to work there are fewer safety inspectors. That can lead to delays like repairing runway lights that guide pilots to the installation of new technology that helps controllers communicate with pilots.

“Radar, preventative maintenance — these types of things that will get delayed as the shutdown continues because the workers are not there to keep the system healthy,” Marinitti said.

TSA employees are among the thousands of essential government workers required to show up without pay. Senior officials have confirmed with CNN that hundreds of TSA employees are calling out sick since the shutdown.

We reached out to the TSA at Denver International Airport about the impacts but have not heard back.

At Rocky Mountain National Park, visitors are arriving only to be disappointed.

“We are out here to visit. We see the sign and realize it’s closed. We came all the way from Vancouver, Canada, and it’s kinda disappointing,” said Stanley Marayan.

Trash cans are locked up at the park and roads are closed because there are no workers to plow them.

The National Park Service is warning visitors to use extreme caution during the shutdown because emergency services are limited. At Yosemite National Park, one death wasn’t reported for a week because of the government shutdown.

“America is great. We want to explore America, so for us, I think this is crazy they are closing the parks. Nature is beautiful here,” Marayan said.

By Taylor Dolven / Miami Herald

MIAMI — Federal aviation safety inspectors haven’t been inspecting anything for the last two weeks because of the government shutdown. Deemed nonessential workers, the inspectors say they’re anything but.

Holding signs saying, “Was your airplane properly repaired and inspected today? The FAA does not know!” at Miami International Airport on Thursday, inspectors spoke with departing airline passengers about what they say is a heightened risk of aviation accidents because of their absence.

“My job is the safety of people,” said Charles Banks, 50, a veteran who has worked as an FAA safety inspector for 15 years. “I have family flying too and I can’t protect them from here on the curb.”

Contrary to their TSA counterparts, safety inspectors have little interaction with travelers. Instead, they work behind the scenes inspecting plane repairs, reviewing pilot work, helping flight attendants with unruly passengers and investigating accidents. About 80 inspectors work at MIA and Fort Lauderdale—Hollywood International Airport, Banks said, along with a larger administrative staff. Airline companies do their own inspections and reviews, but according to the furloughed inspectors, no one is currently overseeing those companies.

“We are another layer of safety,” said Troy Tomey, 52, who has been an inspector for four years. “We’re the last check of the box. Taking us out of it, mistakes can happen.”

An FAA press release from Dec. 22 — the first day of the government shutdown — said “there is no impact to safety or FAA oversight for travelers.” Furloughed inspectors disagree. On Dec. 21, the day before the shutdown, a Korean Air cargo plane’s wing collided on the ground with a Tab cargo plane’s tail at Miami International Airport, damaging both planes. Tomey said he and his team identified damage that one of the airlines didn’t originally report to the aircraft manufacturer, which was in charge of repairing the planes.

Normally, Tomey said he would review the manufacturer’s repair report to make sure everything was fixed. But since he’s been furloughed, that hasn’t happened.

“Both companies have emailed me what they’ve done and my job is to validate what they’ve done is right,” Tomey said. “I’m 99.9 percent sure they did, but we don’t know. Now they’re back in the air flying.”

In Michigan, sheriff’s deputies have been guarding the scene of a fatal plane crash last weekend, waiting for FAA investigators to arrive. The FAA said in a statement that it is limiting investigations to “major accidents involving significant casualties and certain other accidents when failure to proceed with the investigation creates a significant risk to transportation safety.”

In addition to public safety, the personal well-being of inspectors is top of mind for Robert Guevara, legislative chairman for Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, the union that represents safety inspectors.

“We have members who live paycheck to paycheck. We have mortgages to pay. We’re just like everybody else,” he said. “Our creditors demand their bills to be paid on time. We’re worried they’re going to take a hit on their credit reports.”

Still, furloughed inspectors said they’d prefer to be working without pay like their TSA colleagues. At least then, they’d know they were doing all they could do to keep passengers safe.

Federal workers in charge of making sure citizens stay safe while flying said air travel has become more dangerous amid a government shutdown forced by President Donald Trump.

The shutdown, which began Dec. 22 after Trump demanded $5 billion for a useless border wall, has led to more than 3,000 support workers being furloughed while more than 10,000 air traffic controllers continue to work without pay, according to The Washington Post.

Furloughed safety inspectors said planes that haven’t been inspected for two weeks are still being used to transport passengers.

“We are another layer of safety,” safety inspector Troy Tomey, 52, told the Miami Herald as he protested with other furloughed workers outside Miami International Airport on Thursday. “We’re the last check of the box. Taking us out of it, mistakes can happen.”

On the day of the shutdown, union leaders with the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists warned that Congress would need to act fast to get inspectors back to work.

“Furloughing this critical workforce during the busy holiday travel season is neither in the best interest of the nation’s economy nor the oversight of the U.S. aviation system,” the union said in a statement at the time. 

Union leaders at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) are encouraging its members to call their representatives in Congress to ask for an end to the shutdown.

“Even though air traffic controllers and traffic management coordinators remain on the job, dedicated to the safety of every flight, they don’t know when they’ll receive their next paycheck and that adds more stress to an already stressful profession,” the NATCA said in a statement. “This shutdown and the resulting furloughs are rapidly eliminating the layers of redundancy and safety on which the NATCA is built.” 

The union also said hiring and training delays have worsened among the crisis.

“This staffing crisis is negatively affecting the National Airspace System, and the shutdown almost certainly will make a bad situation worse,” NATCA President Paul Rinaldi said in a statement. “Even before the shutdown, controllers have needed to work longer and harder to make up for the staffing shortfall. Overtime in the form of six-day weeks and 10-hour days is common at many of the nation’s busiest and most short-staffed facilities including radar facilities in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas. And none of the controllers forced to work during this shutdown will see pay for their hard work to keep travelers safe until the shutdown ends. This shutdown must end now.”

Trump’s desperation for a border wall will be further hampered after Democrats took control of the House on Thursday. They have vowed not to give him any money for his wall.

• This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

Calling any year the “worst year to fly” is a bold statement. But that’s just what AirHelp, a passenger rights company, is saying about 2018.

The company says 2018 was “the worst year to fly for travelers due to overtourism, delays and poor quality of service from many airlines internationally,” adding that “an average of 2,400 U.S. travelers experienced flight disruptions every day this year.”

While weather and technical issues will always pose challenges for airlines’ punctuality and performance, AirHelp primarily blames overtourism for exacerbating those problems. “Overtourism,” of course, is simply a less charitable way of saying lots of people are traveling.

Can 2019 Be Better?

But semantics aside, that trend doesn’t look like it will subside in the coming year, meaning travelers and airlines alike should prepare for another taxing year in 2019.

The good news is that while no one can control the weather or ensure planes operate smoothly, there are steps travelers can take to mitigate these circumstances. AirHelp has some tips:

• Fly during off-peak days or times, even later at night, when airports and aircraft are less crowded.
• Leave extra time for traveling to and from the airport.
• Many travelers already do this in the era of escalating bag fees, but pack light or only use a carry-on to skip baggage claim.
• Bring chargers and extra entertainment for the airport to keep yourself (or your kids) occupied during a delay.
• Know your rights for flight disruptions to make sure you are properly compensated for any delays

Readers, do you think 2018 was the worst year for air travel ever? Or was your experience just a series of run-of-the-mill disruptions? Comment below.

More from SmarterTravel:

• When to Book Flights, According to Airfare Analysts
• Airlines Owe Travelers Millions for Disrupted Flights in 2018
• The First Face-Screening Biometric Terminal Opens in Atlanta’s Airport

DENVER, Colorado — If you are planning on hiking in a national park or head to the airport to travel this weekend be prepared. Federal workers are warning that the government shutdown is starting to impact safety.

“For air traffic controllers, you only get one take,” said James Marinitti with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. “They work in a mistake-free environment where we are expected to be right 100 percent of the time.”

With 3,000 air traffic support staff being told not to come to work there are fewer safety inspectors. That can lead to delays like repairing runway lights that guide pilots to the installation of new technology that helps controllers communicate with pilots.

“Radar, preventative maintenance — these types of things that will get delayed as the shutdown continues because the workers are not there to keep the system healthy,” Marinitti said.

TSA employees are among the thousands of essential government workers required to show up without pay. Senior officials have confirmed with CNN that hundreds of TSA employees are calling out sick since the shutdown.

We reached out to the TSA at Denver International Airport about the impacts but have not heard back.

At Rocky Mountain National Park, visitors are arriving only to be disappointed.

“We are out here to visit. We see the sign and realize it’s closed. We came all the way from Vancouver, Canada, and it’s kinda disappointing,” said Stanley Marayan.

Trash cans are locked up at the park and roads are closed because there are no workers to plow them.

The National Park Service is warning visitors to use extreme caution during the shutdown because emergency services are limited. At Yosemite National Park, one death wasn’t reported for a week because of the government shutdown.

“America is great. We want to explore America, so for us, I think this is crazy they are closing the parks. Nature is beautiful here,” Marayan said.

“This staffing crisis is negatively affecting the National Airspace System, and the shutdown almost certainly will make a bad situation worse,” NATCA President Paul Rinaldi said in a statement. “Even before the shutdown, controllers have needed to work longer and harder to make up for the staffing shortfall. Overtime in the form of six-day weeks and 10-hour days is common at many of the nation’s busiest and most short-staffed facilities including radar facilities in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas. And none of the controllers forced to work during this shutdown will see pay for their hard work to keep travelers safe until the shutdown ends. This shutdown must end now.”

Researchers in Australia have identified the main factors contributing to pandemic vulnerability in cities as growing populations centered around airports and air travel itself, as population growth outpaces the response capabilities of urban infrastructure.

Such were the conclusions reached by a multidisciplinary team led by Australia’s Centre for Complex Systems and the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity. Researchers believe it had exposed vulnerabilities in the nation’s health infrastructure.

“We should be wary of the tendency for local population growth to out-strip the carrying capacity of the urban infrastructure,” Dr. Cameron Zachreson of the Complex Systems Research Group said. “It’s unclear when the next outbreak will be—however our policies should prepare us for crisis situations, such as epidemics, rather than simply keep pace with growth under placid circumstances.”

The research marked the first time scientists in this area turned to anonymous data from the 2006, 2011 and 2016 Australian censuses, using them to forge a simulator to track similarly anonymous households and suburbs. The study of daily interactions granted insight into how diseases spread and how infrastructure can be better prepared against them. Unfortunately, though medical infrastructure has increased over the years, major hospitals are regularly operating at 100 percent capacity, and the effects of influenza — especially Swine flu — have been on the rise since 2009.

“The Australian Census has provided comprehensive data with which to calibrate a nation-level model of pandemic influenza spread and investigate the population’s vulnerability to the contagion over a period of rapid urbanisation,” Mikhail Prokopenko, director of the Complex Systems Research Group, said.

Between 2006 and 2016, Australia’s population increased by 4 million people, especially in urban areas like Sydney and Melbourne. The massive population spike and a near doubling of inbound international flights over the same period has opened the traditionally isolated nation to a greater variety of epidemics.

“We hope that our research can lend strength to the argument that keeping hospital beds at a consistent ratio to the urban population is insufficient and will not account for the relative increases in disease prevalence that our simulation results suggest will occur,” Zachreson said.

Herb Kelleher, the co-founder of Southwest Airlines and pioneer of low-cost aviation, “without whom there would be no Ryanair”, has died aged 87.

Kelleher set up his budget carrier in Texas more than 50 years ago and changed the face of flying, stripping back costs and inflight services, opening up air travel to a wider range of people.

His biggest legacy for Europe may have been as a mentor for Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, who flew to Dallas, where Southwest is based, in the 1980s to learn how to run a no-frills airline.

Following news of Kelleher’s death on Friday, O’Leary credited the extraordinary growth of the Dublin-based carrier to the lessons of his mentor.

“Herb was the grand master Yoda of the low-fare airlines. He was the leader, the visionary and the teacher: without Herb, there would be no Ryanair, and no low-fares airlines anywhere,” he said.

“His passing is a sad day for low-fare airlines and sales of Wild Turkey bourbon.”

Kelleher had gained publicity from the beginning by promising the lowest fares to customers, or compensating them with a bottle of whiskey if they believed they had paid more than a rival would have charged.

Southwest became an industry powerhouse, a brand infused with the colourful, unconventional personality of its boss. The airline’s first flight was in June 1971, and it grew to fly more passengers around the US than any other carrier, spawning a host of imitators at home and worldwide.

In a statement announcing his death, Southwest said Kelleher had “revolutionised commercial aviation and democratised the skies”.

The company added: “Herb’s passion, zest for life and insatiable investment in relationships made lasting and immeasurable impressions on all who knew him, and will forever be the bedrock and esprit de corps of Southwest Airlines.”

As well as his business nous, Kelleher was known for his extrovert antics and flair for a memorable marketing ploy. When executives of other airlines dismissed Southwest as cattle class for the cheap traveller, Kelleher responded with a TV advert featuring his head covered by a paper bag that he promised to give to any potential customer too embarrassed to be seen flying on his airline.

On another occasion, when Southwest and a rival company were battling to use the same slogan, Kelleher challenged its chief executive to arm-wrestle for the rights. Kelleher turned up in red shorts, lost, but kept using the slogan, with his rival grateful for the publicity Kelleher hadgenerated for both airlines.

Southwest’s current chief executive, Gary Kelly, described working alongside Kelleher as “one of the greatest joys of my life … He challenged people and he kept us laughing all the way”.

Southwest, like the budget carriers that came to emulate it, focused on short-haul flights from point to point, rather than connecting flights and building hub-and-spoke networks as its rivals did.

It pared back inflight service, in the days when airlines promoted the glamour and luxury of cabin life, and used a single model of aircraft, the Boeing 737, to cut costs. Southwest ripped up the blueprint by getting rid of assigned seats, and flew from smaller, secondary airports to minimise costs and delays.

While rivals derided its model, Southwest was making a profit by 1973 and has stayed in the black ever since, an unparalleled streak in an industry known for losses and bankruptcies.

Kelleher became Southwest’s chairman in 1978 and chief executive in 1982, eventually taking a back seat as emeritus chairman in 2001, two years after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. But he remained on the payroll and went to the office regularly.

A law graduate from New York, Kelleher’s low-cost mantra apparently did not extend to stinting on his employees’ wages. He said his people were crucial to the company’s success, to ensure friendly customer service whether the flight was budget or not.

In a 2011 interview, Kelleher said his proudest achievement was that, in an industry where tens of thousands of jobs were lost after September 11, Southwest never made its workers redundant.

Kelleher’s lessons for low-cost aviation

Fly one type of plane
While manufacturers led by Boeing and Airbus tout models for every range and route, potentially maximising the efficiency per passenger, Kelleher decided it was far simpler and more cost-effective to pick one plane and build a network around it, keeping down engineering, maintenance and pilot training costs. He chose the Boeing 737 – as did Ryanair. EasyJet went for the Airbus A320 family.

Drive down costs every year
A laser-like focus on the bottom line put Southwest in pole position, and Ryanair has continued that obsession – although as both have become more established and dominant in their respective markets, Scrooge-ish excess has been downplayed.

Turn around aircraft as quickly as possible
Sweating the assets is crucial when a new plane costs $50m-$100m. The longer the plane is in the sky, the more it earns. Low-cost carriers will now routinely spend as little as 25 minutes on the tarmac between flights – with easyJet executives sometimes seen carrying a bin bag down the plane aisle before landing to help cut cleaning time.

Concentrate on selling seats first
The science of dynamic pricing has evolved, with fares starting as low as needed to fill the planes. Traditional loyalty schemes or air miles have been jettisoned: instead, once the passengers are booked, airlines can make money on ancillaries, from luggage to allocated seats.

FortuneHerb Kelleher, the larger-than-life Southwest Airlines impresario who taught the world that air travel did not have to be the exclusive plaything of the rich, died yesterday at 87.

“Our basic thinking [was that] Southwest would democratize the skies,” Kelleher told me in 2010. “Which we did. I mean, a couple of years ago 85 percent of [Americans] had flown at least one commercial flight as opposed to 15 percent in 1966.”

Kelleher was not the founder of Southwest, but rather the founding lawyer—which came in handy, since the Texas-based upstarts spent five years in court before getting its first plane off the ground in 1971. Why so much litigation? Because back then, as in pretty much all the world, America’s airline industry was a heavily regulated cartel, with the federal Civil Aeronautics Board effectively letting the country’s four main incumbent airlines veto the routes, prices, and even existence of any would-be competitor. Southwest’s investors blew through their $500,000 seed money in legal fees, so Kelleher legendarily vowed to pay out of his own pocket if they lost their appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. They won, and he became CEO.

“One of the [government’s] fundamental purposes was to throttle competition,” Kelleher told me. “Their thesis was that if a new airline was gonna take one passenger—one, that’s what they said—one passenger away from an existing airline, it can’t be certificated….The fact that the existing airlines had 90 percent of all the revenue passenger miles in 1938, and also had 90 percent of all the revenue passenger miles in 1978, at the time of deregulation, would give you somewhat of a hint.”

In our book The Declaration of Independents, Nick Gillespie and I argue that many of the modern world’s best developments came through the combined efforts of three types of people: the theoreticians, who provided intellectual frameworks and persuasion for allowing a good thing to flourish; the deregulators, politicians who got the government out of the way; and the practitioners, who used this marvelous freedom—oftentimes forcing the deregulators’ hands—to democratize a technology, setting off a chain reaction of productivity, wealth, and happiness. Kelleher was emphatically a member of that latter category. As we wrote:

Southwest Airlines exists because Texas is big. Like the now-forgotten Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) in California, Southwest was not subject to all those onerous interstate regulations and could [after finally winning its in-state legal battles] fly multiple routes in a large and populous state. The two airlines served as a field experiment to test—and demolish—the federal government’s half-century-old theory that the airline industry, in the absence of tight regulation, would jack up prices, abandon small-town routes, and hinder the development of the industry itself.

That demonstration project proved critical in the federal deregulation of the airline industry. Once allowed to escape the confines of Texas airspace, Kelleher’s airline became the most profitable on the planet, showing the entire world the joys of being free to move about the country.

Southwest [ushered] five key innovations into a sclerotic air-travel industry that had changed little in a half century: (1) unheard-of speed in turning around airplanes for their next flight, (2) a preference for unloved regional airports, (3) variable pricing between flights on the same route, (4) getting out of the meal-serving business, and (5) a conscious puncturing of jet age cool with corny, down-home friendliness.

That combination—minus #5, depending on the airline—can now be found all over the world, though not nearly often enough in the United States, due to lingering government controls on ownership, airports, air traffic, and more.

Kelleher was an outspoken critic, and frequent legal opponent, of the governnment’s ham-handed interventions into the industry, including being the only major airline CEO to come out against the post–9/11 bailout money. But for all his contributions to the deregulation story, and vast riches in business, he will likely be remembered just as much for being a swashbuckling, chain-smoking, only-in-America kind of entrepreneur who would settle legal claims with armwrestling contests and advertise air travel like this: