On Thursday morning, the Massachusetts Port Authority posted on the social media platform X: “We are awaiting more information from the FAA on which flights will be impacted. For those traveling over the next few days, we do anticipate delays and cancellations and strongly urge passengers to check with their airline before coming to the airport.”
At Logan on Thursday morning, travelers at the B and C terminals described operations as business as usual.
Maggie Smith, 26, said she had no major issues on her flight from Philadelphia to visit a friend in Boston. “We were delayed a little bit, but only by maybe 20 minutes, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.
Still, Smith said she booked a train back to Philadelphia, just in case flight delays get worse over the next few days.
Farah Larrieux, in town for the Haitian American business summit, said her travel from Fort Lauderdale airport was smooth Thursday morning, though she noticed more closed TSA lines than normal in Florida.
Larrieux is worried about her return through Logan though, and said she plans to arrive at the airport three to four hours before her flight.
Delta, which uses Logan as one of its principal hubs, said in a statement Thursday morning that the airline “expects to operate the vast majority of our flights as scheduled, including all long-haul international service.”
“We are providing additional flexibility to all of our customers during the impacted travel period to change, cancel or refund their flights, including our basic economy fares, without penalty,” the company added.
TSA agents are also slated to miss their second paycheck in a row by the end of this week, said Mike Gayzagian, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2617, the union representing officers manning security lines at Logan.
He said the staffing situation at TSA lines has been steady so far, “but we’re waiting to see what happens next week after they’ve actually missed the check,” Gayzagian said.
The union boss didn’t seem convinced that the FAA’s flight reductions would meaningfully improve conditions for TSA workers in the near-term.
“The people who were gonna come through us before this happened, they’re gonna come through us anyway,” he said, adding “If anything, it’ll make it worse because people are gonna rush to try to make different plans.”
How exactly such a large cast of airlines and airports will phase in such a sudden and severe scheduling shift isn’t immediately clear. Duffy and FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said Wednesday that flight reductions will begin Friday.
“It will not be done elegantly,” predicted aviation industry analyst Robert Mann Jr. “It will be done with with an ax as opposed to a scalpel.”
The flight reductions, though largely targeted at the country’s major airports, will undoubtedly have spillover effects across the nation’s air network.
“It’s going to affect the entire nation,” said aviation industry analyst Michael Boyd.
“It doesn’t mean that we’re gonna have massive cancellations and long lines and all that,” Boyd said, forecasting that it would not lead to aviation armageddon. “[It] just means that instead of eight flights a day American might run between Chicago and Dallas, it might be six.”
Boyd said, however, that the reduced flight load should help ease some of the pressure on air traffic workers. “Having fewer airplanes to control will reduce, obviously, their stress,” he said.
For some smaller New England airports not on the list targeted for cuts, all remained normal as of Thursday.
Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) spokesperson Christina Lawson said, “While several major hub airports and connecting cities are included in the FAA’s reduction list, currently, flights operating to and from MHT are proceeding on schedule.”
Bill Fischer, spokesperson for Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport in Warwick, said the airport is “working with every airline that services PVD to understand local impacts. Each airline will have to make independent decisions on how they will operate.”
Back at Logan, Gabriel Fries, 38, said he experienced no delays arriving on Thursday morning. But he’s from Houston, which has already seen three-hour lines at security checkpoints this week, so is paying careful attention to his flight home. He said spending extra nights in a hotel would add financial pressure
Mike Johnson, 33, also expressed concerns about where things are heading. He and his wife work time-intensive jobs, so his mother-in-law flies from St. Louis to Boston every other week to help out.
Without her help, his family would experience “quite a bit of headache,” he said. “I wish Congress would come to terms and create some sort of resolution.”
Steven Porter and Christopher Gavin of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Jaime Moore-Carrillo can be reached at jaime.moore-carrillo@globe.com. Katie Muchnick can be reached at katie.muchnick@globe.com.
About the Author
