When the head of schedule planning at American Airlines, Jay Gargas, stepped off the plane in Dallas-Fort Worth after an 18-hour journey from Istanbul last Wednesday, he faced chaos.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was telling the country that, come Friday, Nov. 7, flights would be cut 10% at 40 key airports in order to ease pressure on an air-traffic control system that, 30-plus days into the longest-ever federal government shutdown, was under crippling stress.

“The first mood was chaos,” says Gargas. What they knew: Robert Isom, the CEO of American, would meet with Duffy at 5:30 p.m. “What we needed to do was create a definition of what the requirements were going to be. We needed to know what exactly was going to be required in order to put the puzzle together.”

By 8 p.m. that ev

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