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This past weekend, as I prepared to board a flight from Toronto to New York City, I looked down at my phone to find two pieces of news. One was that the Senate was readying a deal to end the ongoing government shutdown. The other was that my flight was delayed.

I was lucky. Amid the broader chaos enveloping air travel in the United States these days, a delay of a couple of hours is manageable. Air traffic controllers have now gone without pay for 43 days, leading some to reportedly take a second job when they’re off the clock; to account for fatigue and compensate for the controllers who have

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