FAA cuts flights at forty airports because the people who direct them have not been paid in six weeks.

By Saturday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration had cut flight operations by ten percent at forty of the country’s busiest airports. The reduction was a safety measure. It was triggered by the simple, accumulating fact that the people who keep airplanes from hitting each other had not been paid in six weeks, were calling out sick at unprecedented rates, and could not be expected to perform a job that does not tolerate exhaustion under conditions designed to produce it.

The shutdown reached forty days on this date. The President spent the same week describing the shutdown, on his social network, as politically useful. He did not call it useful for the controllers. He called it useful for him.

This is the part where it is worth saying out loud what is, technically, happening. The federal aviation system is, in this country, an essential function. It cannot be turned off. It can only be degraded. When you stop paying the people who run it but do not relieve them of the obligation to run it, you are running an essential function on the unpaid labor of federal employees while their bills come due. There is a word for that arrangement and it is not a flattering one.

The administration’s official position was that controllers should be at work and that those who were not were unpatriotic. The administration’s actual position was that the shutdown was a useful bargaining chip and that the cost of the chip was being borne by people who could not legally quit.

A 727 does not care which party wears the lapel pin of the man not paying its controller. A 727, on a missed handoff, becomes a fire on a Tuesday.

The flight cuts were lifted on November 17, five days after the shutdown ended. They had not been needed before October 1, when the controllers were paid.

Calmly documenting the decline.