Air Delays | Video

Julie Leonardi | 2/26/2013

The sequester is going to affect all federal agencies across the board, including the Federal Aviation Administration. The White House is warning that hundreds of air traffic control towers could be closed, and travelers could expect long flight delays.

Minot International Airport is small, so it may not see any impacts. Andy Solsvig, Airport Director, said their control tower will not be shutting down.

"In our situation, being a smaller airport, it may be business as usual. But in some of the larger hub airports, there`s potential for some significant impacts."

That means the large airports that we usually connect to like Denver or Minneapolis, could see delays starting in April, specifically when checking through security.

The closing of control towers may alarm travelers, but airports will always make safety their first priority.

“Pilots are trained to communicate with each other, so it’s not always necessary to have a control tower open, however, larger airports, it comes down to the safety factor. When you have so many aircrafts coming and going out of a major airport, you want to be as safe as possible."

If these delays do happen, travelers can expect to wait in longer lines checking in, and friends and family picking up those travelers are also inconvenienced.

"It would be nice if they considered the implications on the late flights, the late arrivals, on how they are going to affect people who have jobs, people who are in school," said traveler Barbara Adkins.

"You have a delay in one station, and that flight is going to another destination, so their arrival gets delayed, and it just kind of delays the whole system. So that`s why, by the end of the day, you have some pretty significant impacts," Solsvig explains.

Several transportation leaders say this all may be exaggerated, but only time will tell.

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