Might be as easy as activating the National Guard. Aren't those the folks we already see on patrol at Penn Station in New York City and at the Port Authority airports? Might entail a lot of hand searches and pat downs, but they'd surely get passengers moving if there were no TSA screeners. I wonder if some of them are already tasked to Super Bowl venues.

The idea of uniformed soldiers detaining and frisking thousands of people who just want to get on a plane to go home after a football game makes me shudder. Even after 9/11, when the NG was deployed to many airports to provide 'security', they didn't handle screening - they merely patrolled the terminals and tried to look tough (despite the pimples and the empty mags on their weapons).

This isn't a military dictatorship, it's a free society, and if our fear of the terr'ist boogie-man is so great that we're willing to let the armed forces (even the National Guard) handle something as inherently civilian as airport passenger screening, we're in far deeper trouble than having a dysfunctional government.

Despite my revulsion at the idea of letting soldiers do the screening, I cannot believe that they'd be any LESS effective than an agency which misses up to 95% of the WEI they're supposed to be looking for.

They can be less effective. If I put a bunch of 7 years old to play TSA with the TSA luggage scanning machines, there would be a lot more variability in outcomes. While it wouldn't be as extreme with adult National Guard members as doing the same with a bunch of 7 year olds on the luggage scanning machines, I am pretty sure there would be even more extreme variability in outcomes with random National Guard members doing the screening than with even the current TSA crew.

Even if the National Guard members on average were at least as effective as TSA in WEI interdiction at civilian airports, the whole optics of further militarization of America for non-emergency purposes would be completely unwelcome by me. And I wouldn't find this kind of shutdown-driven 15% absentee rate of TSA screeners to be a national emergency requiring further militarization of American life in the civil sphere.

Has it started:

FAA halts some arriving traffic into LaGuardia

Just a headline so far.

Quote:

Correction: FAA halts some arriving traffic into LaGuardia Airport amid shortage of air traffic control workers

edit to add:

The story has been updated with a few details.

Hopefully it spreads nationwide.

Drudge Headline: Shutdown Resolution Reached: Announcement at 1:00 P.M.

No additional details.

Announcement now delayed until 1:30.

It's absolutely sad that it has to come to THIS level to get the govt to actually do something. We'll see.

And honestly people should've seen this coming from a mile away.

How many of us here can say we'll happily keep working a highly stressful job (eg, ATC) or a highly thankless job (TSA agents) without pay and we were required to show up anyway without knowing when our next paycheck will be?

Hm... don't the National Guard and the active military have hundreds of fully-qualified ATCs? I wouldn't be too sorry to see some of those folks called in to alleviate the difficulties in the towers, since they wouldn't be engaging in violations of travelers' civil rights or acting in any sort of security, law enforcement, or military capacity. I would see that situation as comparable to the NG engaging in rescue efforts after a natural disaster - they're out there not as warfighters or occupation/peacekeeping forces, but as rescuers and aid workers.

Just a hiatus. In three weeks we're quite possibly going to be back to square one.

In the meantime, I imagine that once paychecks go out, at least some of the TSA sick-outs will return to work, but I think we'll also see a lot of breath-holding, and a lot of TSOs simply quitting and looking for other work.

I wonder whether the resignation rate will be higher among those who called out sick, or those who worked through without pay?

That's what happened when Reagan fired the PATCO strikers in 1981. Many Air Force ATCs were already working in towers at joint USAF/commercial airports. (Petersen AFB/COS and Kirtland AFB/ABQ quickly come to mind). Approach and departure controls in areas where military flying bases and commercial airports were close together were often jointly staffed. Many of the E-4s and E-5s separated and took the many now-vacant civil service ATC positions for considerable pay raises. They also were able to keep their military time and count it towards civil service retirement. These USAF folks were just as highly-trained and experienced as their civilian counterparts.