There were signs the air travel crisis was beginning to ease this week as lawmakers took up a bill to end the government shutdown, but it remained unclear when the federal government might lift its restrictions on air travel.
The Trump administration and the airline industry have predicted it could take about a week after Congress passes legislation to reopen the government for air travel to return to what it was before the government shut down on Oct. 1.
But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised to base his decisions on restoring flights at 40 key airports on data from the Federal Aviation Administration, meaning airlines may face another weekend of strain.
“The weekends have been really, really tough,” Chris Sununu, who heads the trade association Airlines for America, said Wednesday at a news conference.
“If the House acts and we see things moving forward, the hope is that F.A.A. or D.O.T. would be able to see their data points,” added Mr. Sununu, a former Republican governor of New Hampshire. “The big data point we look at is simply that staffing level. That’s the big one.”
Officials pointed to a rise in absences among air traffic controllers, who have been forced to work without pay through the six-week shutdown, as a major factor in the department’s decision to restrict air travel.
Controllers were already contending with severe staffing shortages before the shutdown caused them to miss multiple paychecks, leading some to seek outside sources of income to make ends meet, according to government and union officials. The resulting absences caused mounting “staffing triggers,” which forced delays. The last two weekends have seen the highest levels of staffing triggers of the shutdown.
Mr. Duffy has cited a number of other troubling factors, including the frequency of airplanes coming into worrisome proximity of each other and a rise in reports from pilots about distracted controllers.
In recent days, there have been some signs of improvement. On Tuesday, the Department of Transportation recorded only 11 staffing triggers, five of which were at major airports. That was a significant drop from the 81 staffing triggers that the department noted on Saturday, a high for the shutdown. On Wednesday, a review of F.A.A. advisories suggested that the daily total might be even fewer.
But Tuesday and Wednesday are generally far slower travel days than weekend days, and when compared with a week ago, the dip was not as significant. Last Tuesday, there were only 19 staffing triggers in the national airspace, according to the Transportation Department, and last Wednesday, there were only 14.
Those levels came after Halloween, when there were 61 staffing triggers. In the next days, absences ticked up, leading to the peak number of staffing triggers the department recorded over the weekend.
On Tuesday, Mr. Duffy credited the deal that senators struck to end the shutdown for bringing air traffic controllers back to work.
“I think our air traffic controllers are seeing an end to the shutdown and are feeling more hopeful,” he said during a news conference at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
But he declined to say how long he would need to see numbers moving in the right direction before he might make changes to the mandated flight restrictions, which currently require a 6 percent reduction in flights at 40 airports and are scheduled to rise to 8 percent on Thursday and 10 percent on Friday. The administration could choose to cancel, reduce or freeze those levels at any time.
Controllers have yet to receive the back pay they are owed for days worked during the shutdown. Mr. Duffy said on Tuesday that once the government reopened, it would take about 24 to 48 hours for controllers to receive about 70 percent of their back pay. The remaining balance would be paid within a week of the first check, he said.
Both Mr. Duffy and representatives for the airlines warned that, if lawmakers wanted to avoid a meltdown in air travel before the Thanksgiving travel rush, there was no time to lose in passing legislation to fund the government.
“Now’s the time, it absolutely has to happen now,” Mr. Sununu said. “If the vote doesn’t happen today, my guess is that we could be back where we were a week ago.”
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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