Full Ground Stop at LaGuardia Airport Due to Government Shutdown; Interview with Former FAA Safety Inspector; Airport Delays May Increase Pressure to End Shutdown
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: More updates, effects of the shutdown. A full ground stop now at LaGuardia Airport in New York. That is a major hub. There are delays at Newark Airport, just outside New York, also a major hub. Chad Myers putting this into perspective for us. Chad, tell us what effects this has, not just at those airports but then the carry-on effects because, you know, you've got a lot of flights stopping there on their way somewhere else, coming in, et cetera.</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN WEATHER CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. Exactly. If you're in Jacksonville right now, watching on the little TV screen, and you're parked over in the penalty box, not being able to take off, that's what a ground stop is. Ground stop does not mean the airport is closed. Ground stop means no planes from certain zones can take off until they clear the ground stop, so that they can clear the volume that's in the air. Right now, Newark has some staffing issues -- there you go -- 30 to 45 minutes. The staffing issues are actually centered over the zone of D.C. I'll get to that zone thing in a second. And LaGuardia, now, 15 to 30 minutes. So let's go back here. If you are in any of these zones: B.W. (ph), N.Y. -- New York, O.B. for Buffalo, I.D. (ph), D.C., Atlanta, Z.L. (ph) or J.X. (ph), you are not allowed to take off for Newark until they clear the ground stop. That likely will happen. Then they're going to meter you in there, not get -- try to get 60 or 80 planes in the air all at one time, but I believe that's probably already going on because when we look at the airplanes that are going into LaGuardia right now, we only see 31. Many of them are on the West Coast. You still can take off for LaGuardia if you're on the West Coast because you have four hours to get there. They'll have this all cleared up by then. But what we don't see? We don't see planes here, here, all the way up into Buffalo, up here. No planes from the Eastern zones are in the air to LaGuardia right now because they don't take very long to get there. So you say, "Wait a minute, we can't get a 45-minute plane in the air because we may not have room for it when it gets here." These are all the planes that are in the sky right now, 7,100 planes are in the sky. Now, this is what LaGuardia should look like on the way in, almost 70 planes on the way out. There should be an equal number on the way in. There's not. That's what the ground stop means. Airports are still open, they're just a little bit slow. We'll see what happens throughout the afternoon.</s>POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: That was so telling and interesting --</s>SCIUTTO: Yes.</s>HARLOW: -- and important. Thank you, Chad. Appreciate it.</s>SCIUTTO: Can you believe, Poppy? Whenever --</s>HARLOW: Yes?</s>SCIUTTO: -- you see that picture of all the planes --</s>HARLOW: I never can (ph), no.</s>SCIUTTO: -- in the air at one point, you realize what a -- what an orchestra it is, right? In the skies.</s>HARLOW: Yes.</s>SCIUTTO: And if you start closing airports like this or delaying them, that -- the ripple effects, nuts.</s>HARLOW: It's such a good word, an orchestra that we're, you know, apparently, you know, the government, lawmakers don't think it's important to keep these folks up and running and paid right now. It's sort of unbelievable that this is still going on. David Soucie's with us, former FAA safety inspector. Let's get to the safety aspect of it because, David, we just got the statement from the FAA. And one key line says that the results have been minimum impact to efficiency while maintaining consistent levels of safety. That's the FAA, right? You used to run the safety ops (ph) for them.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, FORMER FAA SAFETY INSPECTOR (via telephone): Yes.</s>HARLOW: But then the woman who heads the union who represents the air traffic controllers just told Jim and I there is a major safety issue.</s>SOUCIE: Yes, there definitely is. I mean, the -- it's an intertwined network, to be able to make a safe airspace system. And that's not what's happening right now. There's a -- with the furloughs, there's what they call the "critical people," the critical safety aspects. And those people are not furloughed until -- at -- not at this point. But those people are systemic people, they're not operational people. So what they're saying is that there has to be people in place overseeing safety, which -- like, I was the safety inspector --</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>SOUCIE: -- safety inspector who goes out and is overseeing particular airlines. Now, when you're talking about safety in the airspace, now you're talking about operational things, and those are not protected. So it's a set of dominoes. And this is only the first domino that's being tilted over, saying, "Hey, we're going to slow down the airspace." So now we're talking about operational safety, which typically lies with the airlines themselves, and their operations. But now we're talking about things that -- it's only going to get much, much worse.</s>SCIUTTO: As you look at this, David, I imagine -- so you've got three airports now. But if we're being told that "You don't have enough air traffic controllers. They're not getting rest, they're not getting paid, some aren't showing up." The likelihood of others being affected by this as you have the carry -- I'm not asking you to look into a crystal ball here, but you know how delicate this whole operation is. And if you don't have enough air traffic controllers today, if this continues another day, another week, I imagine those problems snowball.</s>SOUCIE: Absolutely. Because now what we're talking about is not just local and airports, we get into the regional and what they call the TRACONs, which are areas where, after the airplanes leave the departure or the arrival areas of a particular airport, they go into the regional areas. And those regional areas are the ones that coordinate those airplanes when they're not landing, they're not taking off, they're just in between. And that becomes extremely critical because that's when they hand off from one particular local area to another local area, and that's the part that hasn't been affected yet, but that's the next step, that's the next domino to fall in this system, safety.</s>SCIUTTO: David, thanks so much. Always good to have you. Joining Poppy and I, now, Jackie Kucinich, she's Washington chief -- bureau chief for "The Daily Beast," and CNN's senior political analyst, John Avlon. Jackie, I wonder. Let's get to the politics of this right now --</s>JACKIE KUCINICH, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE DAILY BEAST: Right.</s>SCIUTTO: -- because this is the result of politics. Is this the straw that breaks the camel's back for the president? We already saw support for this whittling away yesterday. Six Republican senators went against the president on reopening the government, to then negotiate border security. You start having issues like this. Is this going to be over soon?</s>KUCINICH: So there's already some talk about a deal being hatched on the Hill. We're still waiting to find out what exactly that is. But certainly, the pressure is on. Talking to Republican senators, even the ones that tend to side with the president, someone like John Kennedy from Louisiana, they were saying the pressure has been ratcheted up in recent days. And I have to imagine, when you -- and we've been saying this for a while -- when it starts affecting the airlines like this, there's going to be movement. And certainly, if the president sees his support among some of the strongest Republicans starting to dwindle, he's going to have to make a move.</s>HARLOW: John Avlon, some of -- important reporting on the thinking in the White House by Kaitlan Collins and Jeremy Diamond that has just crossed that -- you know, the fact that this is happening now, but the prospect of this is something -- an air traffic meltdown, essentially. The prospect of that, John, has long loomed in the minds of the White House --</s>JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.</s>HARLOW: -- and congressional officials as something that might end the stalemate. I suppose if you're in Congress, you have screaming constituents, businessmen and women who can't get to their meetings, parents who can't get home to their kids, on and on and on. And if you're in the White House, you get the same thing, right? I mean, is this going to be it?</s>AVLON: Yes. Look, well, we've been playing chicken with this for quite a while. And the difference is, is that those 800,000 federal workers who have now missed a full month of paychecks, and the pain they've been feeling, has apparently been kind of abstract for a lot of folks in the White House and the cabinet --</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>AVLON: -- who don't seem to be able to empathize with their pain. But all of a sudden, this hits the business class, the upper middle class. It clogs major arteries of our travel. And that has a tendency to get folks' attention in the corridors of Washington, much more, unfortunately, than folks on Main Street who are trying to figure out how to pay a mortgage or pay a bill. So I think this does make it much more real and much more visceral for people in Washington, the real costs of this self-inflicted government shutdown.</s>SCIUTTO: So are -- Jackie, our colleague Manu Raju, of course, covers the Hill.</s>KUCINICH: Yes.</s>SCIUTTO: He's reporting from a Hill source, that what Democrats are trying to do is see what the president would accept as a down payment for border security, though not for a wall. What would he accept as a down payment to end this logjam here? Is that -- is that what looks like the end result would be, in that the president would back down on wall funding but claim, I suppose -- claim a victory by saying he's getting more money for border security?</s>KUCINICH: Jim, your guess is as good as mine, as to what the president would accept. And not only my guess. I think Republicans don't know what the president would accept, and that's been one of the biggest problems through this entire negotiation. Back in December, he stuffed Mitch McConnell, essentially, by not accepting what they had passed. So it really is an open question. We've also seen the president say he'll do something and then turn around and not do it because he has his hardliners -- this is particularly on issues of immigration -- that pull him back. So that is the biggest question of the day. What will the president sign? What will the president --</s>SCIUTTO: Yes.</s>KUCINICH: -- accept? And you have to imagine, that's what -- that's the conversations that are going on, particularly between Mitch McConnell's office and that of the president.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes.</s>HARLOW: John, how important is the owning of the shutdown? Because, you know, it was the president who said, on camera, "I will own this shutdown." This is after he turned down, repeatedly, offers, even bipartisan ones. And I know the polling is not in his favor here, by about -- you know, by about a two-thirds margin against him on this one. But it hasn't swayed him until now. So why would that not sway him and this would, perhaps?</s>AVLON: Well, I think this ratchets up the pressure among core constituencies that Republican congressmen and senators and folks in the White House might listen to. It makes visceral -- not just the inconvenience, but the frustration and the pain for folks who are more likely to have a direct line to the White House. Look, nobody wins a shutdown. But Republicans in recent years keep losing them. You know, they lost them in the confrontation with Barack Obama that Ted Cruz led in the -- during the last presidency. Polls show that this president, who offered to own it at the giddy-up, has been getting his butt kicked by it over the course of it. And there's no way to win a shutdown, it just is a self-inflicted -- infliction of pain and it shows an absolute absence of leadership, which is what the senators were criticizing Mike Pence about, yesterday, behind closed doors.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes.</s>AVLON: The president hasn't led. They're not offering a vision for how to get this done. And this goes way beyond theoretical. This is real people's lives. And this is the greatest nation on earth, showing itself to be a pitiful giant because the president of the United States can't make a plan.</s>SCIUTTO: Flight safety at stake. Of course, the other option is not that they find something the president will agree to, but that the party breaks with him, right? Enough senators break with him to --</s>HARLOW: Yes (ph).</s>SCIUTTO: -- approve something without his support, but we'll see. Jackie Kucinich, John Avlon, thanks so much as always. We're going to have much more on all of our breaking news, right after this break.