FAA workers return after furloughs suspended

WASHINGTON - The Federal Aviation Administration said the U.S. air-traffic system will resume normal operations by this evening after lawmakers rushed a bill through Congress allowing the agency to withdraw furloughs of air traffic controllers and other workers.

The bill, to be signed by President Barack Obama, will let the FAA use as much as $253 million from an airport-improvement program and other accounts to halt the furloughs.

Rushed through Congress with remarkable speed, the bill marked a shift for Democrats, who had hoped the effect of $85 billion in automatic, across-the-board spending cuts this spring would increase pressure on Republicans to reverse them.

Republicans have rejected Obama’s proposal to replace the spending reductions with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases.

“There are some in the Obama administration who thought inflicting pain on the public would give the president more leverage to avoid making necessary spending cuts and to impose more tax hikes on the American people,” said Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania.

The FAA said Saturday that it had suspended all employee furloughs and that traffic facilities were to begin returning to regular staffing levels over the next 24 hours.

The furloughs started to hit air traffic controllers last week, causing flight delays that left thousands of travelers frustrated and furious. Planes were forced to take off and land less frequently to avoid overloading the remaining controllers on duty.

The FAA had to cut $637 million as its share of the government wide spending cuts, which must be achieved by the end of the federal budget year on Sept. 30.

Flight delays piled up across the country April 21 and Monday as the FAA kept planes on the ground because there weren’t enough controllers to monitor busy air corridors.

Cascading delays held up flights at some of the nation’s busiest airports, including in New York, Baltimore and Washington. Delta Air Lines canceled about 90 flights last Monday because of concerns about delays. Most passengers were rebooked on other Delta flights within a couple of hours.

Air travel was smoother Tuesday.

Things could have been worse. A lot of people who had planned to fly last week changed their plans when they heard air travel might be difficult, according to longtime aviation consultant Daniel Kasper of Compass Lexicon.

“Essentially what happened from an airline’s perspective is that people who were going to travel didn’t travel,” he said. But canceled flights likely led to lost revenue for airlines. Even if they didn’t have to incur some of costs of fueling planes and getting them off the ground, crews that were already scheduled to work still had to be paid.

“One week isn’t going to kill them, but had it gone on much longer, it would have been a significant hit on their revenues and profits,” Kasper said.

The challenges last week probably cost airlines less than disruptions from a typical winter storm, said John Thomas, an aviation consultant with L.E.K. Consulting.

“I think the fact that it got resolved [last] week has minimized the cost as it was more the inconvenience factor,” Thomas said.

The budget cuts at the FAA were required under a law enacted two years ago as the government was approaching its debt limit.

Democrats were in favor of raising the debt limit without strings attached so as not to provoke an economic crisis, but Republicans insisted on spending cuts in exchange.

The compromise was to require that every government “program, project and activity” - with some exceptions, such as Medicare - be cut equally.

The FAA had reduced the work schedules of nearly all of its 47,000 employees by one day every two weeks, including 15,000 air traffic controllers, as well as thousands of air-traffic supervisors, managers and technicians who keep airport towers and radar-facility equipment working. That amounted to a 10 percent cut in hours and pay.

Republicans accused the Obama administration of forcing the furloughs to raise public pressure on Congress to roll back the budget cuts.

Critics of the FAA insist the agency could have reduced its budget in other ways that would not have inconvenienced travelers, including diverting money from other accounts, such as those devoted to research, commercial space transportation and modernization of the air-traffic control computers.

Obama chided lawmakers Saturday over their fix for widespread flight delays, deeming it an irresponsible way to govern, dubbing it a “Band-Aid” and a quick fix, rather than a lasting solution to the spending cuts known as the sequester.

“Republicans claimed victory when the sequester first took effect, and now they’ve decided it was a bad idea all along,” Obama said, singling out the GOP even though the bill passed with overwhelming Democratic support in both chambers.

“Maybe because they fly home each weekend, the members of Congress who insisted these cuts take hold finally realized that they actually apply to them, too,” Obama said.

He scolded lawmakers for helping the FAA while doing nothing to replace other cuts that he said harm federal employees, unemployed workers and preschoolers in Head Start.

Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 04/28/2013

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