Will Thanksgiving Flights Calm Down After The 2025 Shutdown?

With the government finally reopening, will Thanksgiving flyers face chaos or find surprisingly calm skies at the airport this year?

The Longest Shutdown Finally Blinks

After forty-three days of political chicken, the federal government is open again, paychecks are flowing, and the FAA is no longer trying to keep the system running on IOUs and caffeine alone. It was the longest shutdown in US history and it did exactly what you would expect to a fragile aviation system that was already stretched.

At the peak, cancellations were projected to reach up to ten percent of the schedule on some days and on time departures sank toward sixty percent as controller facilities reported dozens of staffing outages. Now that funding is restored, those numbers are heading in the right direction. Cancellations have fallen to roughly three to four percent and on time performance has rebounded toward ninety percent as controllers return to work.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation have frozen previously planned flight cuts at six percent across forty of the busiest airports. They had been preparing to dial that as high as ten percent, but controller call outs are dropping and the system looks healthier than it did even a week ago.

With Thanksgiving about two weeks away, the obvious question is whether this is really enough time to salvage one of the most important travel weeks of the year.

How Fast Can The System Bounce Back?

Here is where the experts politely disagree with one another.

Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian has been on television reassuring customers that airlines will be “OK” for Thanksgiving and that travelers should not be afraid to book or stick with their plans. One local CBS interview had him suggesting operations could look close to normal within days of the government reopening, not months.

Government officials are cautiously optimistic. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA leadership say the current six percent cap on flights should give them room to stabilize things and that flights could normalize by Thanksgiving if staffing trends continue to improve.

Labor, though, is not ready to declare victory. The head of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association has reminded travelers that the system is not a light switch. After a previous shutdown it took two to two and a half months before controllers were fully “made whole” again, both financially and in terms of staffing stability.

Industry analysts fall somewhere in the middle. Several have told reporters that passengers should expect visible improvement within a few days of reopening but that it may take one to two weeks for the network to fully stabilize, as crews, aircraft, and schedules are re-aligned after weeks of rolling cancellations.

Simply, practical turnaround time looks like this:

Short term: a few more days of patchy delays and scattered cancellations.
Thanksgiving week: very likely better than the last week of the shutdown, but not perfectly smooth.
Deeper recovery: several months before controller staffing, overtime usage, and training pipelines look truly healthy again.

American Airlines Hints That Some Travelers Already Gave Up

The damage from the shutdown is not just operational, it is psychological.

In recent comments, American Airlines executives have been blunt that the shutdown weighed on holiday bookings. One widely quoted line from chief executive Robert Isom summed it up neatly: nobody wants to put up with hassle. That is airline speak for “people are looking at this circus and deciding to stay home or drive instead.” (Surely, this couldn’t be Isom finding a conveniently timed excuse for yet another disappointing quarter.)

Data backs up the idea that demand cooled as the crisis dragged on. According to aviation analytics and Airlines Reporting Corp., growth in bookings for Thanksgiving slowed to roughly one percent and overall tickets issued for travel through the end of November fell about ten percent year over year – both well below forcast.

American’s own leadership has warned that shutdown disruptions grow worse over time and that mandated flight cuts would eventually force more cancellations and rebookings. That kind of message does not exactly encourage a nervous family of four to lock in tickets for the busiest weekend of the year.

Fewer Flyers, Calmer Airports

A shutdown that scared people out of the skies could set up one of the least painful Thanksgiving air travel experiences in recent memory for those who still go.

Pre-shutdown forecasts suggested that holiday travel was on track to match or exceed recent records. Last year AAA projected nearly eighty million Americans traveling fifty miles or more over Thanksgiving, a mix of drivers, flyers, and train passengers.

AAA is already seeing signs that more Americans may choose to drive instead of fly this Thanksgiving, a shift linked to weeks of shutdown uncertainty and softening demand. Federal officials have frozen nationwide flight reductions at six percent, airlines are restoring aircraft and crew rotations, and booking data shows a measurable drop in tickets issued for late November. In other words, the system is healing just as a portion of travelers appear to be stepping back from holiday flying altogether.

That combination could quietly reshape the airport experience in the United States. Thirty-one million passengers are still expected to travel, so terminals won’t feel empty, but a slightly thinner crowd may give the recovering system room to breathe. TSA lines could move a bit faster, aircraft may carry a few extra open seats on non-peak days, and the usual Thanksgiving congestion might dial down just enough to be noticeable. For a holiday week that once looked doomed by the shutdown, a softer demand curve may end up being a rare advantage.

Conclusion

When the shutdown dragged into its sixth week, it was easy to imagine Thanksgiving travel being completely derailed. Now that Washington has finally reopened the government, the picture is more nuanced.

Operationally, the numbers are moving in the right direction. Cancellations are down, on time departures are up, and the FAA has hit pause on deeper flight cuts while it watches staffing levels improve. Airline leaders and government officials are cautiously optimistic that by the time most of us head to the airport, the system will look much closer to normal than it did at the worst point of the shutdown.

Commercially, the damage to demand is real. Slower booking growth, a drop in tickets issued, and public comments from American’s leadership about travelers avoiding hassle all suggest that some families have already decided that this is the year to stay home or drive.

Put those two trends together and the result could be a Thanksgiving that is still busy, still weather dependent, and still occasionally frustrating, but not the meltdown many feared when the shutdown clock kept ticking. For the travelers who do pass through airport security this year, the combination of a recovering system and a slightly thinner crowd might quietly deliver something we have not had much of lately: a holiday trip that feels almost normal.

What do you think? Will this be an easier or harder Thanksgiving period given the chaos but potentially fewer travelers?