throughout the shutdown, federal agencies say they have been consolidating resources to continue providing services without compromising passenger safety, but yesterday s staffing shortages at faa control centers along the east coast caused major flight delays at new york s laguardia airport, which of course has a ripple effect throughout the entire system. coming back to our live shot here at the airport in atlanta, they are estimating the wait times in the tsa lines, about 15 minutes, which is what you would expect on a normal saturday morning. neil? neil: next week it could be very different, with the super bowl and everything else. reporter: absolutely. city officials are saying this shutdown ended just in time. neil: yeah. i would imagine they would be saying that. all right, jonathan, thank you very, very much. great job. meanwhile, the president of the national air traffic controllers association, paul ronaldi, you wanted to see this day come and so it has. but it did open up
this morning, at hartsfield-jackson atlanta international airport, a local food bank is dropping off donati donations at the airport. yesterday a credit union offered tsa employees free gas at two service stations near the airport. nationwide, many federal airport workers view the temporary end to the shutdown as just that, temporary. they want to try to do in three weeks what they couldn t do in five weeks, so any one of us that s asking what do you think is going to happen, they are going to shut down the government again. that s what we all think. they are going to do it again. reporter: the trade group airlines for america issued a statement on the agreement on the government shutdown saying this measure will allow the federal employees who protect and maintain our nation s aviation system to be paid for the critical work they do. we appreciate the men and women who have been going to work every day to ensure the safety and security of the traveling and shipping public, even thou
our officers are going to get the paychecks that they ve earned, that they ve worked for protecting the traveling public for the last month. we re also very concerned that this is only a temporary measure, and we could be right back here in the same situation three weeks from now. and we re tired of that. reporter: the national air traffic controllers association issued a statement saying although the news today is positive, we must not lose focus on the short-term nature of this agreement and the need to continue to make our voice heard to avoid another shutdown on february 15, 2019. throughout the shutdown federal agencies say they ve been consolidating resources to continue providing services without compromising passenger safety, but yesterday staffing shortages at faa control centers along the east coast caused major flight delays at new york s laguardia airport which, of course, had a ripple effect throughout the system, also impacting some of the flights coming into and out of
workers, for example, i don t know the exact numbers for flight controllers, don t show up, they can t do that, it s against the law, but will there be any punishment meted out for those who did that? well, we have tracked sick leave since the first day, with the secretary of transportation and the faa administrator. our sick leave in the air traffic control unit was actually less than it was in a normal operation. and we stress that this is not who we are and that s not who we are. we are highly skilled, highly trained professionals and take the safety of the flying public very sacred. neil: so what happens if the three weeks, we re back, doing this again and shutting down, then what? i think the immediate relief we re seeing is that the controllers are expecting to get their paycheck tuesday or wednesday next week, some money to start paying some bills. so that stress that they were dealing with is out of the work