[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

The government shutdown continues to put extraordinary pressure on the nation’s air-travel system, with as many as one of every 10 transportation security officers failing to show up for work and reserve workers having to be flown in to bolster depleted ranks at some airports.

The rate of unscheduled absences of airport screening agents dropped to 7.5 percent on Monday, down from 10 percent the day before, the Transportation Security Administration said. But the agency still had to deploy some backup officers to big airports, including Newark Liberty International in New Jersey, a spokesman for the agency said on Tuesday.

The agency’s force of more than 50,000 officers learned on Tuesday that they, like the rest of the 800,000 federal workers who have not been paid during the monthlong shutdown, would miss another paycheck this week. The agency said that many of the absentees had cited financial troubles as their reason for not coming to work, a signal that the call-out rate is likely to continue rising until the shutdown ends. The absentee rate for Tuesday will be available on Wednesday.

Transportation experts and elected officials have begun asking how much longer the air-travel system can continue running safely.

“Every day that goes by puts us a day or an hour closer to a potential bad thing happening,” said John S. Pistole, a former administrator of the T.S.A. “When do we hit a tipping point where there is not only a concern for the efficiency of the air-traffic system, but it becomes a safety issue?”

The entire system is operating under unusual pressures: Workers are being ordered to report for duty with no idea when they will be paid for their labor. Airlines are losing more than $100 million a month in revenue with the grounding of federal workers. Travelers are wondering how long it will take to get through airports and whether it is still safe to fly.

On the front line stand the security screeners, who make less than $40,000 a year and have not been paid in more than three weeks. A rising number of them have stopped showing up for work because of financial troubles, the security administration said.

In their absence, some airports have had to close checkpoints, as Baltimore-Washington International did over the weekend. At others, like Newark Liberty International and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the T.S.A. has had to deploy additional screeners to cope with especially long lines at checkpoints.

On Sunday, the rate of unscheduled absences for security screeners nationwide jumped to 10 percent, more than triple what it had been a year ago, the T.S.A. said.

Mr. Pistole, who oversaw the T.S.A.’s force of more than 50,000 screening agents under President Barack Obama, said a situation that calls for the emergency transfer of screeners between airports is “not sustainable.”

He said he had passed through six airports in the last two weeks and found the officers to be in fairly good spirits. But, he said, “They’re frustrated, obviously.” He said he worried that working under the stress of not being able to pay bills or feed their families could result in a dangerous lapse.

“There are a number of issues that are coming to a tipping point and hopefully that tipping point isn’t something where a potential terrorist sees this as a chance to exploit what is perceived as a vulnerability,” said Mr. Pistole, who is now the president of Anderson University in Indiana.

Mr. Pistole was leading the agency during a partial shutdown of the government that lasted 16 days in 2013, he said. He recalled arriving at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia, near the Pentagon, and finding out that he was one of just five employees, out of about 3,000 who worked there, who were considered essential.

Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York City, said he was starting to have similar concerns about the shutdown after hearing from security officers at Kennedy International Airport on Saturday about “the pressure that it’s starting to put on the folks at the airport.”

Mr. Meeks said some workers told him they were having trouble buying enough fuel to drive back and forth to Kennedy. He said he doubted that they could continue to show up much longer without getting paid.

“They may have enough to get by possibly two months, but after that it’s going to get substantially worse,” said Mr. Meeks, who flies regularly between Kennedy and Washington.

In the meantime, he said, “You’ve got to consider the safety of the air-travel system in its entirety.” Referring to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Kennedy as well as Newark Liberty and La Guardia airports, Mr. Meeks said, “I think the Port Authority is nervous.”

Port Authority officials have been offering breaks to the federal workers on AirTrain fares and parking at the airports, an executive of the authority said. They also have offered to have airport staffers pitch in on some T.S.A. duties, such as line management and distributing the bins that travelers use during the screening process, he said.

Port Authority officials declined to speak publicly about the situation, but they said that there had been no consistent backlog at checkpoints at any of the three big airports the agency operates.

“Things are going pretty well given the circumstances,” said Thomas Carter, the federal security director at Newark Liberty. Staff morale, he said, was “very stable” and the airport has not had to close any of its seven checkpoints during the shutdown.

Zach Wichter contributed reporting.

Source: Read Full Article