FAA / Sequester delays - How does it look out there?
 

I'm heading to SFO. My flight has not been affected, but flightstats says there a major delay at the airport due to constructions of runaway (54 minutes average).... Nothing mentioned due to sequesters or anything out of normal for a Sunday.

www.faa.gov has delays posted due to Other/Staffing at NYC airports and LAX. Delays are in the 50-80 minute range.

I received an email about possible delays from AA this afternoon. I am flying out of LGA early tomorrow and will post here when I know how it looks. I think it is a great idea to have a running thread like this with information on real time delays. Thanks for starting it.

Just thinking a little about this - wouldn't it be in the best interest of the airport operator (and/or airline) to partially fund the controllers who would be furloughed? Ie LAWA or PANYNJ chip in $50,000 to avoid furlough at their airports?

FAA / Sequester delays - How does it look out there?
 

Most delays are expected to hit tomorrow. Hers a link to see delays at some of the major airports.

http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp

These were unrelated to sequestration as the furloughs started today.

It got a lot worse today (Sunday 4/22). I watched LAX's inbound delay increase as the afternoon went on, from 77 minutes to over three hours. I know not all traffic was subjected to this extreme of a delay, however I did watch United's (Skywest) evening departure to LAX get delayed and delayed again until it was finally cancelled. And apparently the poor crew (and thus the pax) didn't know they had an EDCT (departure delay) until after they had pushed back. So they sat on a taxiway for an hour or so before coming back to the gate, and then finding out that their time had been pushed back a third time, which is the point at which the flight was cancelled I think. The aircraft ended up eventually departing SAT for FAT and the pilot told SAT ATC that about half the pax had elected to travel to FAT, even with no guarantee of transportation to LAX.

I have two observations here, and perhaps someone can either correct me or add-on.

1. Does it seem likely that there will be greater impact to the regionals first? In other words, more immediate impact to regionals than mainline. I know American/American Eagle has something of a history of doing this during IROPS.

2. What I observed tonight may have been just a random event, but I wonder how much of an effort the airlines will go to to at least get aircraft moved from place to place that might be somewhere in the vicinity of where the scheduled destination was. Not that FAT is really anywhere close to LAX, but perhaps there were a few pax whose final destination was somewhere in the Central Valley or Bay Area, and thus found some benefit in this re-routing. Doesn't seem like this kind of re-routing would be cost-effective or just plain realistic for the airlines in a lot of scenarios (maybe that aircraft was just scheduled to be at FAT at the end of the day), but I am curious to hear other people's insight and experiences as this situation develops.

I just looked on flightaware to check on my friend and her flight. BA278 was to depart yesterday at 3:45pm but didn't leave until 11:21pm. I can imagine that she's wiped out and still has hours to go before she lands at LHR.

Flying out of LGA this morning at about 9:30. Left the gate within a few minutes of scheduled but we were 25th in line for take off which the pilot estimated to be about 45 minutes. That was pretty close to what it was. The pilot just announced an estimated 30 minute late arrival time.

I experienced longer lines at Immigration and Customs at IAD. I asked the agent whether it was due to the sequester. He said that while they had not yet implemented furloughs, they had eliminated overtime, which did result in fewer agents on duty.

This is such a crock - basically a temper tantrum by DOT officials who can't bear the thought of actually cutting some employees, so they hit the public instead. This will backfire big time when the summer travel season hits.

As reported by AP Today:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/art...ts-4453168.php


"NEW YORK (AP) — It was a tough start to the week for many air travelers as federal budget cuts led to cascading delays along the East Coast Monday morning.

Some flights out of New York and Washington were delayed by more than two hours as the Federal Aviation Administration kept planes on the ground. The federal agency has said furloughs of air traffic controllers could lead to delays if there weren't enough people to monitor busy air corridors.

***

Some groups are warning that the slowdown could hurt the economy.

"Our nation's economy and businesses will pay a very steep price that significantly outstrips savings produced by furloughs," the Global Business Travel Association warned the FAA in a letter Friday. "If these disruptions unfold as predicted, business travelers will stay home, severely impacting not only the travel industry but the economy overall."

Um, the delays are because they actually cut some employees . . .

Well, obviously Government Employees should work for free when The People want tax cuts. Stupid Government, spending taxes on things we demand they provide. Claiming people won't work for free is clearly just Political Manipulation.

Did they actually lay off anyone? I thought they were just reducing hours (everyone has to take a mandatory day off every 10 days or something like that).

Not to get too OMNI/PR on this topic, but we had a retired FAA employee in the AS forum say that the last couple of times they were close to sequestering, those whose hours were cut were the paper pushers (like the former FAA employee himself)--the front-lines folks necessary for daily operations were not touched.

I tend to agree with Boraxo's take on this whole thing. It feels like a ploy to get the public to support more funding so everyone, paper-pushers included, can keep their cushy jobs. Speaking as a former manager of a small business, I can attest that two-thirds of paper-pushers are unnecessary. They should be the first to go, not the folks actually running the front-end operation (in the DOT's case, that's the controllers).

No they didn't cut any employees, they cut the hours of all employees.
If you ever ran a business you would undertand the difference. When your budget is cut, you lay people off and tell the remaining staff to do their work. You don't tell everyone that they will come in 4 days a week and get paid 80% - that would crush morale far more than a round of layoffs.

Ergo, the intelligent way to handle sequester would be to gut the DOT headquarters staff including the political appointees. But they won't do that, because the public would not care nor see a reduction in service. Better instead to piss off the public, so they will call their Congress person to complain. It's petty politics, holding the traveling public as a hostage.