Either way, the local airport would not shut down, the director said. Delta Air Lines and American Airlines both would continue to provide flights into and out of the city using their jet instruments and visually scanning the airfield after landing to avoid other aircraft while taxiing to and from the terminal.

“They’d still fly in,” Oropeza said of the prospect of having no traffic control towers, which it does without overnight as it is. “We would just be classified as an uncontrolled airport. We’re that way anyway 12 hours a day, from 9 in the evening until 9 in the morning.”

There are roughly 65,000 passenger boardings and 65,000 arrivals each year at Columbus Airport.

If the furloughs do kick in and continue through the end of the fiscal year, federal civilian workers would lose about 20 percent of their pay. Soldiers are exempt from the cuts.

The National Federation of Federal Employees is bracing for the worst, said spokesman Cory Bythrow, who has little confidence that Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill will reach an agreement before the budget tumbles into the fiscal crevasse.

“We are, of course, pushing for a deal to be done before,” he said. “These cuts will be devastating for folks. To have 22 furlough days over the remainder of the year for 700,000 DoD employees, that’s a 20 percent pay cut ... We’re not talking trimming around the edges. That’s real money for folks.

“And that’s going to mean real pain, not just at places like Fort Benning and some of the larger Army bases. This is going to reverberate all throughout the country, and all of these communities that rely on these bases for large numbers of jobs.”

Read more here: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2013/02/25/2397576/benning-says-tough-choices-ahead.html#storylink=cpy