Shutdown fallout hits holiday travel

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, the Holiday rush. Triple A projects six million Americans are planning to board domestic flights around Thanksgiving, starting a week from today through December 1st.

WORLD’s Myrna Brown reports.

SOUND: [Dog snorting]

AUDIO: This is Winne the frenchie

MYRNA BROWN: Sarah and Chuck DeStefano are not looking forward to traveling next week without their French and English bulldogs, Winnie and Calypso.

SARAH DeSTEFANO: Who’s going to take care of the animals because we feed them twice a day. They go walking numerous times a day. So I think that’s our biggest anxiety about leaving is making sure the animals are ok.

But finding suitable pet sitters may be the least of their worries this time. The Alabama couple knew a year ago they’d be traveling to California for Thanksgiving. But Chuck DeStefano says they waited to firm up their travel plans.

CHUCK DeSTEFANO: We waited because of the government shutdown. So we weren’t sure. And we still don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it.

BOB POOLE: I hope most of them will make their trips, but I would not bet on it…

Bob Poole is a transportation expert and director of Transportation Policy at Reason Foundation, a non-profit think tank. He says the air traffic controller shortage is to blame for all the travel drama.

BOB POOLE: I just read this morning the FAA saying, oh everything is going to be back to normal….all flights bla, bla, bla… but the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy last week said that they had over 600 retirements of controllers during the 43-day shutdown.

SEAN DUFFY: I used to have about four controllers retire a day before the shutdown. I’m now up to 15 to 20 a day retiring.

Poole did the math on Secretary Duffy’s statistics.

BOB POOLE: And so I took the lower number and multiplied that by 43 days and whoa, that got to that big number…six hundred and something. And that’s probably the minimum number. So the FAA is in a tough situation now.

Poole calls it a vicious but preventable cycle. One that is likely to continue.

BOB POOLE: The FAA is still going to have its funding cut back or not there. Controllers will be working without pay. This was the 13th, 14th government shutdown since 1980. It’s very predictable it’s going to be another one within the next five years and so we can expect the same thing if they don’t change any policy.

Poole has spent the last three decades trying to convince policymakers to take steps to protect air travel from the recurring government shutdown.

BOB POOLE: Ninety-five countries have depoliticized their air traffic systems. Taken them out of the government budget, made them self supporting from air traffic control fees and charges. We are one of the very few countries that does not have direct user fees for airliners and business jets that fly in our air space.

Poole says the fee structure is simple and universal: the gross weight of the plane times the number of miles flown.

BOB POOLE: Our Congress has deprived us of the ability to have an independent funding source for air traffic control. I’ve been talking about this for 30 years off and on. It still hasn’t happened.

Poole says the current attention to the air traffic control system is the perfect opportunity to do something about funding before the next shutdown happens.

Though that doesn’t do much to help travelers next week. So, what does that mean for families like the DeStefanos?

BOB POOLE: The long hauls from east coast to west coast are probably less likely to be a problem than flights needing to change a plane somewhere from a smaller place to a hub, then to some other smaller place.

Chuck and Sarah DeStefano just may make their coast to coast connection. But if things don’t go as planned:

SARAH DeSTEFANO: Chuck does it the best. He gets on. He knows we’re going to get there. He falls right to sleep. I don’t. But he just enjoys the process.

CHUCK DeSTEFANO: I view every airport as like Disneyland. I just enjoy the airport, enjoy the people, enjoy what it has to offer. I’ve traveled so much in the past few years, I’ve just learned to enjoy it and just roll with the flow.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Myrna Brown.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.