Plane crash investigators held up by airport delays as partial U.S. shutdown continues

Specialists investigating the Air Canada plane crash at LaGuardia that killed two pilots were held up by security delays at other airports Monday, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), as a partial U.S. government shutdown is causing long lineups across the country.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at a Monday press conference that some of her investigators were delayed getting to New York.

“We have our air traffic control specialist who was in line with TSA for three hours, until we called in Houston to beg to see if we can get her through so we can get her here,” Homendy said. “So it’s been a really big challenge to get the entire team here.”

Hundreds of thousands of Department of Homeland Security workers, including from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew the department’s funding last month. 

Many TSA agents have called in sick or quit their jobs as a result. The staffing shortages have forced some airports to occasionally close checkpoints, leading to significant wait times.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sent armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to more than a dozen airports to help manage the long lines, in a move that has drawn criticism and raised concerns about travellers’ safety.

Aviation consultant Scott Hamilton, managing director of Leeham Company, says he cancelled a Thursday flight from Chicago to Atlanta, where people were reporting wait times of four to six hours. 

On the other hand, he did a round trip to Seattle from Chicago last week and “breezed through” security at both airports.

“Some airports are operating as appears to be normal. Other airports are a complete disaster,” he said.

Hamilton says the degree to which each airport is affected depends on how many TSA employees have quit or called in sick.

But the deployment of ICE agents raises further alarms, he says, especially for foreign travellers who may already be hesitant.

His advice to Canadians is to avoid flying to the U.S. if you can.

“If the trip is discretionary in any way, shape or form, or you have a viable alternative … go someplace else than the United States,” he said. “And I say that as an American.” 

Problems could drag on: experts

On Monday, nearly 11 per cent of TSA agents scheduled to work — more than 3,200 — missed their shift, according to DHS.

At some airports, that percentage was much higher. DHS says 40 per cent of TSA agents at William P. Hobby International Airport in Houston, and 37 per cent at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, did not show up for work.

The department said at least 458 officers have quit their jobs during the shutdown.

Airports experienced similar delays during the 43-day government shutdown last fall, which was centred around health-care spending and subsidies.

Hamilton says these issues are likely to drag out, in part because TSA will have to rehire and train new workers.

The administration announced over the weekend that it would deploy ICE at TSA checkpoints unless Democrats agreed to fund the DHS.

Republicans and Democrats have been in a standoff since Feb. 14. The Democrats are refusing to fund ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection — two separate law enforcement agencies that both operate under DHS — without changes to their operations, in the wake of the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.

Aaron Hoffman, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University, says if the immigration agents “follow the scripts” and stick to providing support roles to TSA officials, he doesn’t see any problems with their deployment.

“The part that is obviously worrying is that we’ve seen ICE agents behave in ways that are fairly shocking over the past several months. And what the administration says and what the administration does are not always aligned,” said Hoffman, who is a U.S. citizen.

“So there’s always this kind of concern of what’s actually going to happen once they really start working at these airports in bigger force.”

White House border czar Tom Homan said the agents would provide crowd control, but Trump said they can also make arrests.

Hoffman says the deployment of ICE is a “Band-Aid” the U.S. government is putting on the airport staffing problem, which comes down to a fight between Republicans in the White House and Democrats in Congress. 

He says Democrats have found this to be an issue to which their voters are committed, so he suspects this fight could drag out longer than the last government shutdown over the fall.

“I don’t see this resolving itself very quickly,” he said.