Airline pilots have a message for the president: for safety’s sake, end the shutdown.

In a letter addressed to President Trump, the Air Line Pilots Association, a union that represents 61,000 US and Canadian pilots, urged that immediate steps be taken to end the government shutdown due to the dangerous effect it’s had on “safety, security and efficiency of our national airspace system.”

The shutdown’s most obvious impact on air travel was seen fairly quickly with TSA workers—forced to work without knowing when or if they’ll receive a paycheck—prompting some to call in sick or to quit altogether. But the letter illuminates how the shutdown is affecting safety in ways that aren’t as visible to the public as long security lines.

According to the letter, penned by the association’s president, Joe DePete, a number of factors have compromised the safety of planes and airspace. One of the more alarming issues being that planes aren’t being inspected as thoroughly as they should be. Indeed, citing the lack of inspectors as well as “manufacturing oversight activities” the letter states that, “These safety and oversight inspections will potentially allow for the introduction of safety issues that put passengers and airline crews at risk.”

And it’s not just the immediate safety of air travel that has pilots concerned. There are factors that will continue to be affected even if all furloughed personnel were to return to work today. The shutdown is causing delays to the implementation of a new communications program. Air traffic controllers and pilots are unable to train properly and so will likely need to be retrained which will not only have to be done at great expense but will also delay the full implementation of what the letter calls an “important airspace system upgrade.”

Lastly, the letter calls attention to the hardship being imposed on those doing the necessary work without the safety of a paycheck. “They are dutifully providing safety of life services while facing increasingly difficult financial pressures to provide for those dependent on their paycheck,” states the letter. “The pressure these civil servants are facing at home should not be ignored.”

The letter itself was dated January 2, but concerned members of the aviation industry and federal employees continue to make their concerns heard. With the shutdown drawing a close to its third week, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, along with other industry representatives and associations, held a rally today in front of the capitol in order to protest the shutdown. While speaking at the rally, DePete put it starkly, stating that, “The aviation economy is at stake. People’s livelihoods are at stake. Safety is at stake.”

On twitter Friday, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association pleading for travelers to call their members of congress to let them know that the government shutdown needs to end now. According to the NATCA, the number of air controllers are already at a 30-year low, which leaves the training and hiring of new air traffic controllers impacted if the shutdown is long-term. Schilling says, “If it’s months, certainly there can be some degradation in the ability to get controllers on the scopes and get them working. If it’s years, it certainly would have an impact.”

BOSTON (AP) — A major winter storm brought some of the coldest temperatures of the season and covered a large swath of the country in snow as it wreaked havoc on air travel and caused slick road conditions throughout New England Sunday.

The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings or advisories for part or all of at least 15 states stretching from southeast Missouri to the northern tip of Maine ahead of the weekend storm.

Nearly 2,000 flights were canceled around the country Sunday, with Boston’s Logan Airport being one of the hardest hit, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company.

Typically bustling security lines, ticketing counters and baggage claims were largely deserted Sunday morning at Logan Airport, but some stranded passengers lingered.

“We’ve been sleeping, playing Candy Crush,” said Xavi Ortega, a 32-year old engineer whose 10:30 p.m. flight to Barcelona was canceled.

Ortega said he and his wife, who reside in the Spanish city, slept overnight at the airport and wouldn’t be able to get onto another flight until Sunday night.

Meanwhile residents along the heavily populated coast from New York to Boston awoke Sunday having largely escaped major snowfall but bracing for plummeting temperatures that will likely lead to a hard freeze and potentially dangerous conditions.

Manhattan saw mostly rain, cities along Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts’ coast recorded two to five inches, but mountainous interior communities were blanketed in fresh snow.

The Adirondacks in upstate New York recorded up to 20 inches in certain areas while western Massachusetts’ Berkshires saw as much as 10 inches. Parts of the Vermont have registered a foot of snow and could see up to another foot by the time the storm is over.

Nicholas Nicolet and his 6-year-old son Rocco welcomed the fresh powder as they cross-country skied on the sidewalks of Montpelier, Vermont early Sunday morning during the storm.

“We think it’s great,” said Nicholas Nicolet.

Meteorologists warned the primary concern now is plunging temperatures that will be some of the coldest felt so far this season.

Wind chills were expected to hit in the teens in the New York City area, 25 below in Albany and down to 40 below in the Adirondacks.

In New England, they’re expected to fall to as low as 20 below zero around Boston, 30 below zero in the Berkshires and as low as 35 below zero in parts of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.

Officials warned people to limit their time outside to prevent frostbite and avoid treacherous travel conditions. They also said to prepare for flooding and power outages in places.

“It’s life-threatening,” said Ray O’Keefe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albany. “These are dangerous conditions that we’re going to be in and they’re prolonged, right through tomorrow.”

As of Sunday at noon, utilities in Connecticut were reporting more than 19,000 customers without power and more outages were expected in the region as ice accumulated on trees and power lines.

“We had more freezing rain and sleet than we expected,” observed Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin as he extended his city’s parking ban so public works crews could clear streets before the ice hardened.

Amtrak canceled some trains Saturday from Chicago to Washington and New York and between New York and Boston and Pennsylvania on Sunday.

A ferry service route across Lake Champlain between Vermont and New York was also closed Sunday and flights were mostly cancelled at Vermont’s Burlington International Airport and New Hampshire’s Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.

The powerful, wide-ranging storm was caused by the clash of an Arctic high-pressure system with a low-pressure system coming through the Ohio Valley.

It caused travel problems as it dumped up to 10 inches of snow on parts of the Midwest Saturday.

In Chicago, a plane skidded from a slick runway at O’Hare International Airport. No injuries were reported. In Kansas, a snowplow driver was killed when his vehicle rolled over. And in southeastern Missouri, slippery conditions caused a 15-vehicle crash on Interstate 55.

President Donald Trump urged Americans affected by the winter storm to “be careful” in a tweet early Sunday, but, as he’s done in the past, he conflated the short-term weather phenomenon with longer-term climate change.

The White House’s own

National Climate Assessment

recently rejected the idea that a particular plunge in temperatures can cast uncertainty on whether Earth is warming.

“Amazing how big this system is,” Trump tweeted. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
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Associated Press reporters Bob Salsberg in Boston, Deepti Hajela in New York, and Lisa Rathke in Montpelier contributed to this story.
Associated Press reporters Bob Salsberg in Boston, Deepti Hajela in New York, and Lisa Rathke in Montpelier contributed to this story.

Virtually every one of the world’s commercial airports and leading destinations currently remain vulnerable to criminal abuse or ‘rogue’ operation of drone technology, notwithstanding the shock wake-up call from the chaos at London’s Gatwick Airport last month before Christmas and more recently at London Heathrow, as well as last week’s exploding drone incident in Yemen.

This warning is because there remains very low awareness among the business community of the extraordinary pace at which drone technology is evolving… and this makes staying ahead of the threat posed by those who would abuse this technology challenging, for even the most competent of businesses and management teams.

The commercial air drone market is currently still like the Wild West… exciting, and representing unprecedented economic opportunity for companies and organizations which are fast adopting this exceptional technology. However, there will always be those who would flaunt laws and regulation to cause maximum disruption around the world. This particularly impacts on more vulnerable sectors such as airports, financial centers, energy facilities, stadiums and concert venues, etc, which require tailored defense strategies to protect against what is a new and real security challenge.

The British Armed Forces have been world leaders in the use of drone technology, for both offense and defense, for many years, long before the recent adoption by the business world, and it is their techniques which are now being applied, particularly in counter-drone strategies, which utilize an ever-evolving range of advanced technologies to detect, track, identify and defeat the threat posed by those who would abuse air drone technology for nefarious means.

There are literally hundreds of counter-drone products and manufacturers worldwide and the market is expanding on a daily basis, making it extremely difficult to keep track… which is one reason why the rapid, often knee-jerk adoption of such technology in the face of media pressure, while sometimes providing a short-term fix, can often be a long term error of judgement and, in isolation of appropriate policies and procedures, is rarely effective.

Our counter-drone team, primarily ex-military, continually analyze this market to identify those systems which will be of most appropriate use to our clients in the application of both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ effect counter-drone measures. Soft effect measures include intelligence-led threat identification, robust airspace management with commensurate risk management policies and legal procedures. Hard measures are broken down into ‘Detect, Track and Identify’ and ‘Defeat’, which are subject to strict usage restrictions.

One of the challenges for our clients in all sectors is the need to adopt drone technology always within a disciplined strategy which supports the organization, ensures security and also ‘future proofs’ what is put in place. The adoption of counter-drone technology is no exception and so we would urge those organizations reacting to recent events to take a breath and think strategically.

As far as criminals or ‘rogue’ drone operators are concerned, they will always exist… but their task will be made much more difficult by an increasingly informed business community, the putting in place of more sophisticated counter-drone strategies, the implementation of the forthcoming ‘Drone Bill’ within the UK and the adoption of the new aerial drone standards, which were launched for public and peer group consultation in November 2018 by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). Their deadline for public responses on this consultation is January 21, 2019.

About the author

Robert Garbett is founder and chief executive of Drone Major Group, a global drone and counter-drone consultancy, convenor of the ISO Working Group responsible for global drone standards, and chairman of the BSI Committee for UK Drone Standards. He is the only authority to be advising on standards in Britain, Europe and worldwide, a leading consultant within the global drone industry, and an advocate on the potential of drone technology to transform economies.