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- Holiday travelers should expect flight and airport delays if the shutdown drags on.Data shows disruptions are mounting as air traffic controllers work their second month without pay.Industry watchers said safety could be at risk if the system is stretched too thin.
It's starting to look like the lingering government shutdown could scramble holiday air travel plans.
Delays at airports recently spiked, and government officials and transportation watchers alike warn we could be on the precipice of a wider slowdown.
Staffing shortages have been ricocheting through the system, affecting air traffic control, where employees have been working without pay for a month, and airport security lines, where TSA workers are also working without pay.
And the impact hasn't been limited to the usual choke points. It's hitting different cities on different days. One day, it's Los Angeles or Orlando. Another day, it's Burbank, Houston, or Nashville.
Despite the underlying pressure, the average delays in October were relatively normal. But there's mounting data that shows things are getting worse.
Data from the aviation analytics company Cirium shows that about 20% of flights at major US airports, or about 1 in 5, departed late in October 2025 — only about two percentage points worse than September.
Still, the shutdown has pushed October's delays above prior years. FAA data shows the rate of delayed departures in October was about 12.8% in 2024, about 14.7% in 2023, and about 16% in 2022.
Airports like Los Angeles and Burbank experienced temporary closures earlier in the month, but Cirium said a broader slowdown didn't peak until October 30 — nearly a month after the shutdown began — when the average delay rate at most major airports spiked to more than 30%.
And the ripple effects are building.
A staffing shortage at one air traffic facility can force flights to be held at their origin or rerouted around congested airspace hundreds of miles away. Air traffic staffing shortages triggered a host of FAA advisories nationwide over the weekend.
"This is unprecedented," an air traffic controller told Business Insider. They added that the shortage of qualified air traffic controllers was already straining their community, even before the shutdown forced them to work without pay.
Holiday travel could push things to the brink
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday that if the shutdown continues another week, the government may even close some airspace because it "cannot manage it" due to the lack of controllers, ABC News reported.
He said on Thursday that November and December bring busy holiday travel that will only exacerbate the situation: "People will not be able to go from one place to another because of the government shutdown."
It's possible the industry will see a repeat of the 2018-2019 shutdown, which lasted 35 days and ultimately ended after a surge in controller callouts forced LaGuardia to temporarily halt inbound flights, and other airports to experience massive delays.
Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
This year's shutdown became the longest in US history on Wednesday.
This weekend showed how volatile things can get: the Department of Transportation said staffing accounted for about 65% of delays Friday, 59% Saturday, and 84% Sunday. For context, that number was only 5% pre-shutdown.
The FAA said in an X post on Friday that "half of our Core 30 facilities are experiencing staffing shortages" and that nearly 80% of its New York-area controllers were absent.
On Sunday, more than 40% of flights were delayed in Nashville and Newark, and delays in Orlando topped 30% after arrivals were halted earlier in the week.
"I think the real consequence is, what kind of rolling delays do you have throughout the system, right?" Duffy said on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "We've seen problems at LA, in Dallas, in DC, Boston, Atlanta. And so I think it's only going to get worse."
The aviation tracking website Flightaware shows there were nearly 4,800 delays into, out of, and within the US on Monday — fewer than the 6,000 on Sunday and Friday. Nearly 4,000 were delayed on Tuesday.
Some days stabilize — Cirium said Saturday's and Monday's performance was above average — but that calm can dissolve quickly as the day goes on and staffing strains compound.
Flight Aware
Beyond ATC, travel analyst Henry Harteveldt previously told Business Insider that a shortage of TSA agents will make it more difficult for people to make the flights that actually depart on time.
If it's anything like the previous shutdown — when the TSA absentee rate more than tripled from the usual 3% to 10% — these queues will only grow.
For example, Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport was experiencing a three-hour security wait on Monday. And that's weeks before the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel season, which are already among the busiest travel days of the year.
Industry analysts warn of rising risks
Duffy told ABC News on Sunday that he believes that boarding an airplane is still safe, but said there is "a level of risk that gets injected into the system when we have a controller that's doing two jobs instead of one."
Art Wheaton, a transportation industries expert and the director of labor studies at Cornell University, said in a statement that doing the job of a controller without pay is "playing with fire."
"It is a recipe for disaster to continue adding pressure to an already problematic and excruciating job," he said. He added that these problems are compounding an already strained workforce that's about 3,000 controllers short.
Aviation safety consultant Anthony Brickhouse told Business Insider that controllers are highly skilled individuals, but humans have a breaking point.
"We design systems to minimize the impact of human mistakes, but when we add financial stress and fatigue to an already high-stress job, we could be looking at something a lot more serious than a two or three-hour delay," he said.
He added that recent near-misses, including one involving Southwest Airlines in Cleveland and another involving Delta Air Lines in Boston, cannot be directly connected to the shutdown.
Still, these high-profile events likely add to the worries of cautious flyers. Brickhouse added: "I'm not saying passengers shouldn't fly, but this really speaks to the urgency at the moment and how important it is to have our politics come together and figure this out."
