We Need to Reopen the Government and Pay Our Air Traffic Controllers

Imagine working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and being expected to be right 100 percent of the time. Not 99.9 percent of the time—100 percent of the time. You don’t get to choose which days you work, and that means you’re working a lot of Saturdays and Sundays while your kids are home and a whole lot of missed baseball, softball, and other sporting events.

Being an air traffic controller is one of the most difficult, demanding, high-stakes jobs in America, and that’s on a good day. Right now, they aren’t even being paid to do it. Sure, they’ll get paid when the shutdown ends, but an IOU from Uncle Sam doesn’t pay today’s grocery bill or the mortgage.

Instead, as has happened in the past, many of them are looking for work on the side to keep paying the bills while waiting for this shutdown to end. Instead of spending what little time they have off with their families, they’re scrambling to make ends meet. It’s making the most challenging job in America nearly impossible.

Now, I want to be clear. America’s air traffic controllers are absolute professionals. As a pilot, many of them are my friends and it’s infuriating to me that this is happening to them. I can tell you that all this additional stress will worsen the staffing challenges our air traffic controllers are already facing, resulting in more delays at our airports as we head into the holiday season. That’s not on them; it’s on the folks who refuse to pass the clean funding bill.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Last year, I worked with Republicans and Democrats to pass a bipartisan Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization bill that provided the agency with new tools to attract and retain air traffic controllers. For the first time in years, the ATC training academy is full. The pipeline is ready, but it remains frozen until this shutdown is over.

There’s simply no excuse for holding our air traffic controller’s hostage over partisan political differences. The Senate needs to listen to the professionals at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and immediately pass the clean continuing resolution to reopen the government. This shutdown needs to end now.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves