Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.
“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”
Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
Given my expectations of the regime, they will be fully staffed by military ATC.
Military ATC is not Civilian ATC.
This is going to be a worse shitshow than I anticipated just in air travel.
Trump believes he can do what Reagan did. The only issue is the current ATC system is 16000 controllers compared to 12000 in the 80’s and the military has around 3500 controllers which is almost identical to the number in the 80’s. There is no way the military can cover the same traffic as civilian controllers can, and unlike Reagan the current world is much more reliant on air travel.