“I don’t think we’re going anywhere," Wadhwa said, adding that she had events planned later and being stuck in New York would “really mess everything up.”
She was just one of untold numbers of travelers across the Northeast whose plans were thrown into upheaval Friday morning after a shortage of air traffic controllers triggered significant flight delays.
A few hours later, President Donald Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government, alleviating the increasing strain federal agencies were struggling under.
But the disruption to the nation’s skies showed how the shutdown ratcheted up the pressure on political leaders because it reverberated far beyond government workers and affected a large number of people.
The delays cascaded along the Eastern Seaboard, reaching as far north as Boston. LaGuardia was the only airport that had been closed off to departing flights from other cities because it was so crowded with planes taking off and landing on a weekday morning. Delays on flights into LaGuardia were averaging almost an hour and a half, the FAA said.
On Friday, staffing problems at two air-traffic control facilities on the East Coast, one near Washington and one in Jacksonville, Florida, prompted the FAA to slow traffic in and out of airports. Those facilities manage air traffic at high altitudes.
The agency said there had been a slight increase in the number of controllers calling in sick at those facilities Friday.
The control towers at the airports that serve New York City and the central air-traffic control facility on Long Island that monitors those airports were fully staffed, said a person who had been briefed on the situation.
“The president has been briefed and we are monitoring the ongoing delays at some airports,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Friday morning. “We are in regular contact with officials at the Department of Transportation and the FAA.”
In Washington, Democratic leaders pounced on Trump, blaming him for the air traffic slowdown.
“The #TrumpShutdown has already pushed hundreds of thousands of Americans to the breaking point,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote on Twitter. “Now it’s pushing our airspace to the breaking point too. @realDonaldTrump, stop endangering the safety, security and well-being of our nation. Re-open government now!”
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2. House Democrat, echoed the speaker — and also sought to assign blame to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader.
“The Trump-McConnell shutdown is not a game and has real-world consequences to our economy and the well-being of millions of Americans,” Hoyer said in a statement, adding, “If this shutdown does not end immediately, the harmful impact will continue to grow.”
At LaGuardia, Amy Howell of Indianapolis, who was waiting for a flight home on Delta Air Lines that was scheduled to leave at 11:30 a.m., said, “I can’t worry about the things I can’t control. But I would like to get home.”
Howell was not casting blame on anybody for the government shutdown.
“I’m not mad,” she said. “But I would like to see my family.”
Valerie Pacheco was at a food court in LaGuardia waiting for a friend who was traveling from Vermont, but whose flight was delayed. “What I’m worried about is that they’ll cancel her flight altogether,'’ said Pacheo, who had flown in from Miami so the two could spend the weekend together in New York. “Then we have a problem.”
At Boston’s Logan airport, several Delta flights to LaGuardia and Philadelphia were delayed by up to nearly two hours. But some travelers appeared to be taking the delays in stride.
Megan Brendel, 57, from Norwich, Vermont, was headed from Boston to Norfolk, Virginia, for a board meeting of the Rhodesian Ridgeback Club of the United States, and was supposed to fly through LaGuardia.
“It’s an inconvenience,” she acknowledged, but she said she supported the president’s push for a wall on the southern border and didn’t mind having her travel plans disrupted. But she had harsh words for Pelosi — who she said was being “completely political” and “disrespectful to the office of the presidency” — and for federal workers who were calling in sick to work.
“I don’t think it’s fair that the air traffic controllers have called in sick,” she said. “They signed up for the job.”
The union that represents flight attendants Friday said they had been warning that the lengthy government shutdown would start harming the nation’s air travel system.
“The aviation system depends on the safety professionals who make it run,” the union said in a statement. “They have been doing unbelievably heroic work even as they are betrayed by the government that employs them. They are fatigued, worried, and distracted — but they won’t risk our safety. So the planes will stay on the ground.”
On Wednesday, unions representing air traffic controllers, pilots and flight attendants offered an urgent warning that the lengthy government shutdown had created serious safety concerns for the nation’s air travel system. Like many other federal employees, the controllers have been working without pay for more than a month.
A spokesman for the FAA confirmed that it was rerouting planes and slowing air traffic to cope with an increase in the number of controllers calling in sick.
The spokesman said the changes were having “minimal impacts to efficiency.”
On Friday morning, the departures screen at one of the terminals at LaGuardia began to show ‘Delayed’ across arriving flights.
The partial shutdown has caused strain across the air travel system. For more than a month, thousands of transportation security officers and air traffic controllers had been working without pay. Many took on side jobs driving for ride-hailing apps or in restaurants to try to pay their bills.
Staffing among air traffic controllers, who are responsible for keeping planes from colliding, was already an issue even before the shutdown, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union
The number of certified controllers is at a 30-year low, the union said, and staffing at the centralized radar facility for the airports that serve New York City, which is known as a Tracon, has only about 130 controllers, far short of its full complement of 228.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.