The Trump administration warned there would be an air travel meltdown next month if the government shutdown continued, predicting chaos as controllers miss additional paychecks and the country enters the busy holiday season.
“It could be a disaster, it really could be, because at that point you’re talking about people missing three paychecks, they’ve missed four paychecks,” Vice President JD Vance said at the White House on Thursday after a meeting with aviation industry leaders. Controllers “are doing heroic things to make it work as well as it possibly can,” he said.
Mr. Vance added, “Every single person I talk to, to a word, they are worried that the delays reach a point where it makes it very, very hard for the American people to fly.”
The Trump administration has been warning of potential peril in the skies since the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, with Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, repeatedly speaking about the toll missed paychecks would take on an already overtaxed work force of air traffic controllers. The F.A.A. is about 3,000 controllers short of the approximately 14,000 it needs to fully staff the towers and other air traffic facilities that manage the flow of flights between airports and keep planes from colliding.
And this week the controllers — who are among the federal workers required to work through a shutdown — had a payday with no pay. But Mr. Duffy has said that controllers should not expect the kind of measures the administration has taken to ensure that members of the military continue receiving checks, and Trump officials on Thursday repeated their calls for Senate Democrats to drop their demands for health policy concessions and sign on to a Republican stopgap funding plan.
While the shutdown has lasted nearly a month, air travel has continued without a big increase in significant interruptions, even as some major airports — including Newark Liberty International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington — reported ground stops and long delays because of understaffed towers.
Mr. Duffy, who also attended the meeting at the White House on Thursday, suggested that the system had been able to withstand the effects of the shutdown because of the dedication of controllers and some fortunate circumstances: October has been a relatively slow travel month, and most of the country has experienced good weather.
“But as we go into November, travel picks up,” Mr. Duffy said, speaking in ominous terms about the holiday season coinciding with more missed paychecks. This week, he began warning that while many controllers have enough savings to absorb one missed paycheck, he knew of none that could get through two unscathed.
By the time holiday travel season approaches, he said, many air traffic controllers “might want to stay in the job, but they cannot.” He predicted that many more would begin taking on side gigs, or leaving their jobs entirely, to make ends meet.
At that point, “you’re going to have mass issues starting in the airspace,” Mr. Duffy said. “People will not be able to go from one place to another.”
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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