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Even before they saw one of the rarest mammals in the Gulf of Mexico, the two amateur fishermen were already feeling lucky. They had motored to their favorite spot 35 miles off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., downed a couple Miller Lites, and caught their third mahi mahi when they heard the sound of air escaping a blowhole.

“Then you start looking,” said Ben Renfroe, who grabbed his phone to film it. “Is that a dolphin or a whale?”

But dolphins in the Gulf don’t grow bigger than motorboats, and the dark figure Renfroe spotted just before it sank back into the water looked much larger than his 26-foot craft. Seconds later, the animal appeared above the horizon again, first showing off a small dorsal fin, then gliding its trunk over the waves like a surfacing submarine.

Back on shore, experts reviewed the video and agreed: It was almost certainly a Rice’s whale, one of the most endangered whales in the world. Authorities estimate only around 51 of the animals remain – and they don’t live anywhere but the Gulf. To avoid extinction, the U.S. government has estimated that no more than one can be killed or seriously injured by human activity every 15 years.

Which activities threaten the whales the most is not a mystery. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has cited more than 20 risks, including energy exploration in the Gulf, vessel strikes and underwater noise. But although the agency has produced helpful science about the whales, NOAA has repeatedly delayed following rules and adopting measures that could help the whales survive those man-made threats.

“The bureaucratic apparatus is slow to catch up,” said Aaron Rice, an ecologist who studies the whales but is not related to scientist Dale Rice, for whom they are named. “It raises this philosophical question of values, like, how much do we value these animals that live in U.S. waters?”

“Shameful” delays for protections

On April 20, 2010, about 40 miles offshore from Louisiana, the BP drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caught fire. Within two days, 11 workers had died and the rig had sunk. The well that was left behind would gush more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next three months. It was the largest marine oil spill in history.

Rice’s whales were some of the animals most harmed by the disaster. About one in five died after the oil slick engulfed their habitat, and those that survived became more likely to get sick or lose pregnancies. Their numbers dropped to fewer than 100.

But the spill also prompted more attention to the whales. Before Deepwater Horizon, the animals were thought to be a type of Bryde’s whale, a kind of whale found everywhere from South Africa to Japan. After the disaster, researchers from NOAA and other groups analyzed bones that washed up on Gulf shores and conducted genetic tests. This was no subgroup, they soon realized. This was a completely new species. The ones in the Gulf were believed to be the last ones left on the planet.

The newest great whale was also one of the most endangered, and it was right in America’s backyard.

“Every animal counts at that point,” said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation nonprofit. “Every one you kill is another nail in the coffin.”

Losing the species would mean losing an animal that fuels the ocean’s productivity by transferring nutrients from the seafloor to the surface, and back again, with every dive. Great whales also reduce carbon emissions. When they die, they sink an average of about 33 tons of CO2 that they’ve stored in their bodies throughout their life to the bottom of the ocean. That’s more than 1,000 times the carbon a tree captures in a year. Experts say the whales’ extinction would be an ominous indicator of an unhealthy Gulf ecosystem.

And it would be a reflection of slow U.S. action to protect the whales. Federal laws mandate that NOAA list a marine mammal as endangered soon after a species is shown to be at risk with the best scientific data available. Typically no more than one year after the species is listed, the agency must also determine what habitat the animal needs to be protected. That earns both the animals and their physical home special consideration when projects are proposed nearby that could harm them – a constant threat in the Gulf. Nearly all the U.S. oil and gas extracted offshore is pulled from the Gulf of Mexico; industrial activity is a fixture of the area.

But NOAA has been years late meeting its deadlines, and though the whales were eventually added to the endangered species list, it still hasn’t designated the whales’ habitat. Conservation nonprofits have sued the agency three times since 2016 to urge it to comply with the law.

The agency is also required to publish a plan for how the government intends to help the Rice’s whale population recover to healthy numbers. NOAA hasn’t done that yet either, though the agency has released an eight page outline.

The chief of NOAA’s marine mammal branch in the Southeast, Laura Engleby, said the agency is limited by its staff and resources, and is doing the best it can to help the animals. She said the agency is in the middle of several restoration projects and is conducting outreach to spread awareness of the whale’s dwindling numbers. In November, a part of a skeleton that helped scientists determine that Rice’s whales were a new species will be added to a public exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

But Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst for Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nonprofits that has brought the agency to court for missing protection deadlines, said the repeated delays should be considered scandalous.

“It’s an extreme case showing the extent to which an agency will delay,” said Jasny. “And that is really shameful, given that the species that are being managed are on the verge of extinction.”

Ships remain serious threat to whales, NPR analysis shows

In 2021, a group of nonprofits grew tired of waiting for NOAA to act. They petitioned the agency to impose a speed limit to protect the animals from at least one of their immediate man-made threats: ships.

Gulf ports are busy; the port of Houston exports more tons of cargo than any other port in the country. Since 2009, two Rice’s whales have been killed or injured after ships hit them. And research on whales injured by ships over the past few decades shows that the strikes that seriously harm the mammals are often caused by big vessels that are moving quickly.

So the environmental groups recommended that when ships 65 feet or larger cross a portion of the whales’ habitat in the eastern Gulf, they be required to slow down to 10 knots or less. They also asked the agency to prohibit travel in that zone under the Florida panhandle at night, when the whales float near the surface and are harder to spot.

Slowing down ships to save whales isn’t a new idea. North Atlantic Right whales are also endangered; around 350 are estimated to remain in the American and Canadian Atlantic. Along the U.S. East Coast, a 10-knot limit has been in place to protect them for more than a decade. Research indicates that lowering speeds to that level works.

“Vessel speed is the low-hanging fruit,” said Davenport, the lawyer for Defenders of Wildlife, one of the nonprofits that petitioned NOAA. “That is the most important thing that we can do right now.”

But after NOAA invited public comments on the proposal this summer, the energy and marine industries pushed back fiercely – and politicians who represent states where those sectors are top employers drafted legislation against it.

On Aug. 18, Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., proposed a House bill that would block NOAA from passing the speed limit until the government could show it wouldn’t negatively impact commerce. A Senate version of the bill was later introduced by Sen.Bill Cassidy, R-La.

Cary Davis, the president of the American Association of Port Authorities, a seaport industry advocacy group, told NPR that a limit for just a few Rice’s whales in the Gulf didn’t make sense.

“It’s wildly overbroad and ill-conceived to force a blanket slow-down if there’s only so many of them,” Davis said. “And time is money, of course.”

After reviewing the feedback, on Oct. 27, NOAA announced its decision. It denied the nonprofits’ speed limit petition.

In a statement, the agency said it needed to focus on other conservation priorities, and would try to get vessel operators to slow down voluntarily. But without a mandatory limit, the risk of ships injuring the whales is high across the Gulf.

NPR analyzed traffic data for over 6,000 ships that were 65 feet and larger. The data, collected by land and satellite receivers, indicated where the ships went and how fast they were going as they traveled across the 28,000-square-mile swath of the whales’ proposed critical habitat in 2022.

Out of all the journeys the ships took that crossed the whales’ habitat last year, 80% were traveling at an average of more than 10 knots. Without a limit in place, vessel speeds could continue to be a serious threat to the whales.

Environmentalists called NOAA’s denial of the slow-down petition absurd, given that ship strikes had already injured more Rice’s whales in the past 15 years than the government has said the species could afford to lose if it hoped to avoid extinction.

“To engage in yet more delay while the agency pursues paperwork is just an utter failure in conservation,” said Jasny, from NRDC. “I find no way to read this other than as an act of political cowardice.”

When it comes to underwater noise, another established threat to the whales, there are also few limits.

No noise limits

Rice’s whales let out deep, low moans that pulsate underwater for up to a minute.

Scientists say the calls are unique – nothing on the planet sounds like them – and that the whales may make them to survive. Marine mammals use their hearing to find mates and food, to maintain relationships, to navigate and to avoid predators.

But the Gulf is one of the loudest places underwater in the U.S.

Fast ships don’t just hit whales. At speeds of over 10 knots ship propellers start to generate intense cavitation noise. That sound causes most of the underwater sound pollution from the shipping industry, said Andrew Kendrick, a naval architect and consultant for the Canadian government. And when it happens near the whales, “they can’t hear themselves think.”

Scientists have observed that Rice’s whales have sometimes stopped making their own sounds in the presence of ships. But the noise from seismic air gun surveys is still more powerful.

Air gun blasts are one of the most prevalent underwater sounds in the Gulf, and they overlap with the low frequency range in which Rice’s whales communicate. Because sound travels faster in water than in air, researchers have picked up the blasts on recorders located more than 400 miles away – about half the length of the Gulf.

“There is just this constant blanket of human noise,” said Rice, the ecologist.

And the air guns are not just noisy. When they’re dragged behind vessels to help identify the location of the oil and gas, they send explosions of compressed air into the water, for weeks at a time. Those blasts, which go off every 10 seconds, send waves of pressure downward powerful enough to penetrate miles beneath the bottom of the seafloor.

Technological alternatives do exist that can be less disruptive. Some air gun technologies that can survey the ocean up to ten times more quietly than conventional guns are on the market now. Brands sell kits that can transform old guns into quieter ones, which is cheaper than replacing every gun on the ship.

Upgrading the technology isn’t inexpensive. It can cost up to 10 million dollars, said representatives from Sercel, a company that sells both conventional air guns and alternatives that are friendlier to marine mammals. But that’s a tiny fraction of the income generated by just four of the largest energy companies working in the Gulf. Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and BP earned more in 2022 than any other year in history. Collectively, they earned around 160 billion dollars.

Still, the government doesn’t require the industry to use alternatives. Though excessive noise is prohibited on land, there are no limits to the amount of noise that can be sent into the ocean.

“If the regulations aren’t there,” said Robin Ellis, a vice president of sales at Sercel, “they’re not going to do it.”

After reviewing public documents, NPR found that’s the case in the Gulf. Of the 25 seismic survey projects that have cumulatively been approved to blast noise into the ocean for more than 1,000 days over the next three years, all but two energy companies have said they will use conventional airgun systems that stream multiple guns behind their boats.

Harming whales is not the industry’s goal, said Alex Loureiro, the scientific director for EnerGeo Alliance, a trade association that represents oil and gas companies. The alternative technologies are just not as efficient, she said.

“It’s going to take time for the industry to actually be able to use these technologies effectively,” said Loureiro.

When asked whether NOAA was doing anything to encourage industries to switch to quieter technologies that are better for whales, an agency representative pointed NPR to a document that said it wanted to reduce noise, but listed few concrete steps for changing the rules.

Environmental groups and scientists think sightings of Rice’s whales may become increasingly rare. In an open letter to the Biden administration they predicted a serious consequence if conservation action is not taken quickly: the first man-made extinction of a great whale species could happen under U.S. watch.

In October, Ben Renfroe and his friend put the prediction to the test. They went looking again for the Rice’s whales, hoping to repeat their summer luck. The two spent almost 10 hours in the mammals’ habitat, motoring more than 100 miles around the Gulf of Mexico. They spotted a few birds and accidentally hooked a shark with their fishing pole.

But this time, they saw little else. No blowholes. No fins. No sign of any whales.

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Methodology

NPR downloaded Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) ship transponder data from MarineCadastre.gov, a cooperative effort between the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This AIS data is collected by approximately 200 land-based receiving stations from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Nationwide Automatic Identification System. As the range of land receivers is usually limited to 40-50 miles off the coast, the data was combined with satellite-collected AIS data from Spire and processed by Global Fishing Watch to provide more comprehensive coverage of the Gulf of Mexico.

In NPR’s analysis of transits through the proposed critical habitat of the Rice’s whales, a transit was defined as an instance when a ship entered or exited the area. A new transit was also started if there was more than a day’s gap between two AIS broadcast points.

The speed of a transit through the critical habitat was calculated using a distance-weighted average speed, as detailed in a vessel speed rule assessment published by NOAA. This method corrects for variations in AIS transmission and reception rates, which can be influenced by the speed and type of the vessel.

Ships measuring less than 65 feet in length as well as law enforcement, search and rescue, and military vessels, were excluded from this analysis.

Access the code here.

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NOAA Fisheries encourages all boaters, anglers and others operating in Gulf of Mexico waters to report all suspected sightings of Rice’s whales by calling 877-WHALE-HELP (877-942-5343).

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This reporting was supported in part by a grant from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, a nonprofit that supports journalists covering the environment.

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Barrie Hardymon edited this story and Noah Caldwell produced it. Robert Little and Graham Smith contributed editing and producing support. Research from Barbara Van Woerkom, and art direction and photo editing by Emily Bogle. Graphic by Daniel Wood.

WASHINGTON — In the nation’s capital, Metro trains are filling up again as federal workers come back to the office a few days a week.

But if you ask those riders, they will tell you the trains are less full than they used to be.

“It’s not as crowded as it was before, pre-pandemic,” said Gina Adu of Bowie, Md., while waiting for a train at the L’Enfant Plaza station. Damien Doyle of Cheverly, Md. agrees. “This is about it now — maybe the new normal,” Doyle said.

The new normal is ridership that’s back to about 80% of what it was before the pandemic nationwide — though it’s not distributed the same way. Public transit systems are seeing higher volume in the middle of the week. But rush hour peaks are smaller, with more trips at other times of the day and evening.

“We’ve seen that the normal workweek has changed fundamentally,” said Robert Puentes, president of the non-profit Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, and a regular Metro commuter.

The rise of remote work since the pandemic is changing the way Americans commute. And that’s prompting a crisis for big public transit systems, which were mostly designed to get lots of commuters downtown all at once, and are now scrambling to adjust to this new reality.

Congress spent tens of billions of dollars to get these agencies through the pandemic. But that money is set to run out next year.

Now a combination of ridership declines and inflation has left some major transit agencies with massive budget deficits — including systems in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

“The irony with transit is, for years the ones that were generating most of their revenue through passenger fares were the ones that were deemed to be the most successful,” Puentes said. “But those agencies are having a more difficult financial challenge because they relied on those passenger fares.”

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs the Metro system, is projecting a deficit of $750 million next year. General manager Randy Clarke says WMATA is weighing some deep cuts to service.

“If we do that, you’re talking, draconian. Like service, as we know it does not exist,” Clarke said in an interview. “Which then leads to less revenue for the system… Which then leads to more cuts, more cuts. And the whole thing falls apart.”

That’s known in the industry as a “death spiral.” But Clarke is hopeful that Metro will find the money to avoid that catastrophic scenario — and he’s not the only one who’s optimistic.

“There is a bit of a doom cloud that is hard to ignore, but I think things are better than we think,” said Lindiwe Rennert, a researcher at the non-profit Urban Institute who co-authored a new report on how public transit agencies can overcome the financial challenges they’re facing.

Transit systems that have a stable funding stream, often from local sales taxes, are doing better, Rennert says. And she argues there’s a strong case for that kind of funding, because mass transit benefits everybody — even if you never use it.

“The more other folks take the train, take the bus, the fewer cars are in your way as a driver. And that is simply a fact,” Rennert said.

Rennert notes that bus ridership is roughly back to where it was before the pandemic. And that the most nimble transit agencies — in systems in Richmond and Cincinnati and Tucson — have more riders now than before.

So does the light rail system in the Seattle area.

“We expanded the service. We’re reaching more people in more places. And so therefore, we have more riders,” said Julie Timm, the CEO of Sound Transit, one of the few rail systems in the country that’s seen a jump in ridership since 2019.

In fact, Sound Transit set ridership records over the summer when Seattle hosted Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, and a stop on the Taylor Swift tour.

“What I think we’re seeing as a victory here in Seattle [is] a virtuous cycle of you put the funding in, you keep a reliable service and you see people use the service,” Timm said. “When they have those good experiences riding, they come back, they ride again.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anyone shopping for a home right now has to contend with a double whammy of high prices and high interest rates. To make matters worse, there aren’t a lot of homes on the market to choose from.

A survey by mortgage giant Fannie Mae found 85% of Americans think it’s a bad time to buy a home.

Still, some people are taking the plunge. First-time buyers accounted for nearly a third of home sales during the 12 months ending in June, according to an annual snapshot from the National Association of Realtors. A record 70% of all buyers didn’t have children under 18 living at home.

Lance Zaldivar bought his first home over the summer, not long after getting out of the Marine Corps. He socked away money for the down payment during his last deployment in Kosovo. His fiancee, Jasmin Benitez, also had some savings from her job as a nurse practitioner.

“My fiancee is a little pickier than I am, and at this point now I’m glad that she was,” Zaldivar says. “She was looking for a little bit of a yard. A little larger square footage inside the house. Somewhere that we can raise a family in.”

Paying up front to lock in a lower mortgage rate

The couple found a three-bedroom house in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston, for $245,000 — well below the national average.

Their mortgage rate will be 6.25%, but they paid additional money paid up front to get a lower rate for the first two years, while Zaldivar finishes his bachelors degree.

“I was real happy about that,” Zaldivar says. “That eased my concern, compared to some of the other interest rates I’ve seen.”

Average mortgage rates have climbed even higher in the months since Zaldivar bought, approaching 8% this fall before settling back to 7.5% last week, according to Freddie Mac.

Sellers are holding tight to their low-rate homes

Rising interest rates have put homes out of reach for many would-be buyers. They’ve also discouraged people who already own homes from selling and giving up their cheaper loans. That’s a big reason there aren’t many “For Sale” signs out there right now.

Kristina Dunlap says there wasn’t much to choose from when she and her husband began looking for a house this year. But after three years of renting in Nashville, the couple was determined to buy a place.

“We calculated how much we had spent in rent over three years essentially and I think that number was a lot scarier than what the interest rates are right now,” she says.

Dunlap is a freelance marketer and her husband Eric is a construction manager. They thought of buying a fixer-upper, but decided that was more work than they wanted. Instead, they opted for a newly-built home near Springfield, about 25 minutes north of Nashville.

“The whole neighborhood is still under construction actually at the moment. We don’t even have paved roads currently,” Kristina Dunlap says.

New homes are a bigger share of sales

About 13% of homes sold this past year were newly built, according to the Realtors’ report, up from 12% the year before.

Like many successful buyers, Dunlap made tradeoffs — moving farther from the central city and giving up the bonus room she was hoping for. She did get the open floor plan and the two-car garage she wanted, as well as a yard for her dog, Kujo.

“The yard was a must,” Dunlap says. “When he gets — I call them the zoomies– When he gets those twice a day, we just send him out there and let him run it all out.”

The purchase price was just under $350,000 so the Dunlaps needed about $30,000 to cover the 6% down payment and closing costs.

Down payment is the hard part and average income of buyers is at a record high

According to the Realtors’ report, coming up with a down payment is the biggest challenge for many first-time buyers, especially those who are saddled with high rent and student loans.

The average income for all home-buyers hit a record high: $107,000. That highlights the challenges that middle-income people face in buying a home.

“Down payment, finding that right home — inventory is still incredibly tight — We know that they have a hard time, especially finding an affordable property,” says Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist at the Realtors’ association. “But these homebuyers are somehow making it work and getting in there.”

Lance Zaldivar and his fiancee moved into their new house in June and wasted no time unpacking. While the average buyer plans to stay in a house for 15 years, Zaldivar plan to keep his home much longer.

“Whenever we do have a family, grandkids, great grandkids, they can always come over to our place, and it will be home for the Zaldivars,” he says.

When Bill Kowalcic first heard that his company Advanced RV was trying out a four-day workweek, he was filled with questions.

“All of us were a little nervous — like, are we going to be able to get our work done? Are we going to do OK? Is this going to hurt us?” says Kowalcic, a skilled craftsman who works in the finishing department.

A year and a half later, he has answers.

Not only has his team found shortcuts and time savers, he’s happier on the job.

“Gosh, it’s been great,” he says.

“I’ve never had a job where I’ve said this before, but at the end of the three-day weekend, I’m ready to come back in Monday morning.”

The trial has spread globally, but few manufacturers have taken part

Advanced RV builds custom, luxury motorhomes out of Mercedes-Benz cargo vans in Willoughby, Ohio. It is one of more than 200 companies and only a handful of manufacturers that have taken part in an ongoing global trial led by the organization 4 Day Week Global.

For six months, businesses agree to reduce working hours while maintaining the same pay. The goal is not to do less with less but to maintain 100% productivity by bringing more energy and efficiency to the workplace, while lessening fatigue and burnout.

The success stories coming out of the trial have offered a work-weary public hope that a better work-life balance is achievable. Of the 41 American and Canadian companies that began the trial in 2022, none has reported going back to working 40 hours a week.

A closer look at how Advanced RV has managed to significantly reduce its working hours while keeping up productivity reveals some essential elements: a tolerance for risk, and also trust, creativity, and open-mindedness.

“The most significant thing I could do as a business owner”

The company’s CEO Mike Neundorfer says he first heard about the four-day workweek about two years ago.

In 2021, Iceland reported that two trials involving 2,500 workers, most of them government employees, had found working fewer hours for the same pay led to improved well-being with no loss in productivity. In some places, workers reported being even more productive after cutting back their hours.

The idea resonated deeply with Neundorfer.

“Think about it. What more impact could a person have on a number of people that work for them than giving them 50 holiday days a year, a three-day weekend every weekend?” says Neundorfer. “It just seemed like the most significant thing I could do as a business owner and manager.”

Neundorfer, who founded Advanced RV in 2012 after leading other successful businesses, had never envisioned the company as a 24/7 kind of operation. His employees don’t work more than 40 hours a week, even though that has meant customers wait two years for their custom RVs.

“We could probably make more money and figure it out if we did overtime, but we never do,” he says.

Instead, in April 2022, he decided to try the opposite, moving everyone to 32 hours a week without any cut in pay.

Neundorfer knew it was a gamble, one he thought had a 50/50 chance of success. The vast majority of other companies in the four-day workweek trial employ office workers. Many of them are nonprofits.

Still, as a small business, he says it was easy for him to experiment. Advanced RV has 50 employees, no shareholders other than Neundorfer and his wife and no formal board.

And he was OK with the odds.

“Everybody won’t feel that way,” he says.

Skeptics in the ranks

In fact, when Neundorfer first talked with his employees about joining the four-day workweek trial, not everyone in the room was thrilled.

“I raised my hand and I said, I don’t think we should do this. This is not going to work,” says Tricia Eller, who joined the company in 2014 and is primarily responsible for customer relations.

She strongly believed everyone needed to be at the office five days a week.

“This is how business is run,” she insisted at the time.

Assigned to take Mondays off, she simply worked from home to ensure that customers would get the kind of attention they were used to.

A search for efficiencies

Undeterred, Neundorfer began searching for efficiencies.

He asked every department whether there were tools or equipment that could speed up tasks. His upholsterers asked for an industrial sewing machine that would allow them to bind carpets in a quarter of the time.

“This was a no brainer,” he says. “We looked at the cost and we didn’t have to even sit down with a spreadsheet. We knew this was something we should do.”

In the finishing department, Kowalcic says he and his two teammates got hyper-focused on what processes they might eliminate, without cutting corners.

“We started making more templates, more little jigs and boxes to help us with things that are repetitive,” he says.

They also got more mindful about who does which tasks the best and fastest, and started dividing up the work accordingly.

Each change might only save them mere minutes.

“But if you save six or seven minutes on six or seven things, then you’re really starting to push the envelope a little bit and get a little bit more done,” Kowalcic says.

Productivity did take an initial hit, but happiness is up

Neundorfer says Advanced RV did see a dip in output as a result of moving to a 32-hour workweek.

“You lose productivity,” he says. “And when you lose productivity, you lose some volume, and you lose profit.”

Now a year and a half into this experiment, he says the company has nearly recovered those productivity losses.

“And I think that at some point, some of the improvements will take us beyond what we were able to do in 40 hours,” he says.

Judging by employee satisfaction, the experiment has already been a resounding success.

Kowalcic now spends his Fridays riding his bike, working on his home remodel, and getting ready for evening gigs with his heavy new wave band Public Squares. And then he still has the weekend.

“Spending more time with family, just a little more relaxation, meditation — it really helps keep me centered,” he says.

On her Mondays off, Eller in customer relations still checks her email — she says she just can’t let go — but she’ll also spend time with her mom, who is retired, or go to the movies.

“Talk to me on a Sunday, and you’ll find me in the best mood because I know I have Monday to myself to relax,” she says.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

It’s stressful to fly around the holidays. Airports are packed, tickets are expensive and bad weather can cause significant flight delays and cancellations.

So, if you have to travel, is there an optimal time to do so? Scott Keyes, founder of the travel site Going.com (formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights), shares his recommendations, including days to avoid and the best time of day to fly.

Don’t travel around Thanksgiving and Christmas

“It’s one of the worst times to travel,” he says, due to flight disruptions, crowds at the airport and ticket prices. “My secret, best advice for travel over the holidays is: if at all possible, just don’t do it.”

If you have to fly for the holidays, do it on the day itself

“You just see far fewer people traveling then,” says Keyes. “And with fewer people, you can see lower fares and fewer disruptions,” including delays and cancellations. So think about booking tickets to depart or arrive on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

Avoid peak travel days

For a lot of folks, the whole point of traveling during this time of year is to be with family on the actual holiday, says Keyes. “So the busiest and most crowded times [to travel] are going to be in the few days leading up to the holiday. Think Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving and December 21st, 22nd and 23rd around Christmas.”

A travel delay that stretches out over a few days, like a snowstorm, can quickly ruin a trip, he adds. “That’s when you’re going to have the most competition with other travelers” for a limited amount of seats if you’re trying to rebook a flight.

To avoid this situation, Keyes recommends flying a few days before or after these peak travel times. So instead of flying on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, you might consider traveling a few days earlier.

Travel in January — the 8th, to be precise

If you can wait, travel in January, says Keyes. You will probably have a much better flight experience.

Keyes even has a preferred date for that month: Jan. 8, he adds. “It’s my favorite date of the entire year. I circle that date on the calendar because whereas flight prices really get inflated over the Christmas-New Year period, around Jan. 8, they just fall off a cliff from the most expensive time of the entire year to the absolute cheapest.”

Ticket prices, while “extremely volatile,” can drop 75-80%, he says. For example, a nonstop, roundtrip ticket from Los Angeles to Tokyo from Dec. 22-29 costs $1,996, according to Google Flights. But if you took that trip from Jan. 10-17, the fare dips to $427 — a nearly 80% discount. And while a nonstop, roundtrip ticket from New York City to Miami from Dec. 24-Jan. 1 costs $608, it’s only $138 from Jan. 9-16 — a 77% discount.

Take an early and direct flight

“There are two types of flights that have the highest odds of getting you to where you’re going on time or at least without a major delay: early morning flights and nonstop flights,” says Keyes.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report for October, flights between 6-7 a.m. had a nearly 90% on-time departure rate, versus 64% for flights between 5-11 p.m.

With morning flights, “your plane [has been] at the airport overnight. It’s sitting there and ready to go when you get there in the morning,” he says. Afternoon flights, on the other hand, depend on planes that are flying in from somewhere else and may be subject to delays.

Direct flights have the advantage of not having layovers. “If you take a connecting flight that gets delayed an hour and a half but you only had a one-hour layover, all of a sudden you’ve missed your connecting flight and you have to get rebooked” — not an easy feat during the holiday season.

Prepare yourself for potential flight disruptions that may keep you at the airport. Keyes likes to pack “noise-canceling headphones and a little snack box, because frankly, airport food is not very memorable,” he says. And he likes to download a few books and movies to his iPad — “just in case I’m having to hang out at the airport longer than expected.”

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The audio was produced by Clare Marie Schneider. The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual producer is Kaz Fantone.

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Becky Queen remembers opening the letter with the foreclosure notice.

“My heart dropped,” she said, “and my hands were shaking.”

Queen lives on a small farm in rural Oklahoma with her husband, Ray, and their two young kids. Ray is a U.S. Army veteran who was wounded in Iraq. Since the 1940s, the federal government has helped veterans like him buy homes through its VA loan program, run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But now the VA has put this family on the brink of losing their house.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ray Queen. “The only thing I did was trust a company that I’m supposed to trust with my mortgage.”

Like millions of other Americans, the Queens took advantage of what’s called a COVID mortgage forbearance, which allowed homeowners to skip mortgage payments. It was set up by Congress after the pandemic hit for people who lost income.

But an NPR investigation has found that thousands of veterans who took a forbearance are now at risk of losing their homes through no fault of their own. And while the VA is working on a way to fix the problem, for many it could be too late.

For the Queens, this all started in September of 2021, when Becky’s mother died of COVID-19. She had to take an extended leave from work and lost her job.

So last year, with their savings dwindling, the couple says they called the company that manages their mortgage, Mr Cooper, and were told they could skip six months of payments. And once they got back on their feet and could start paying again, the couple says they were told, they wouldn’t owe the missed payments in a big lump sum.

“I very specifically asked ‘how does this work?'” says Becky Queen. “They said we’re taking all of your payments, we’re bundling them, and we’re putting them at the end.”

That is, the missed payments would be moved to the back end of their loan term so they could just start making their normal mortgage payment again.

But that’s not how it worked out.

In October 2022, the Department of Veterans Affairs ended the so-called Partial Claim Payment program, or PCP, that enabled homeowners to do that. This happened even though the mortgage industry, housing advocates and veterans groups all warned the VA not to end the program, saying thousands of homeowners needed to catch up on missed payments. Interest rates had risen so much that many couldn’t afford to refinance or get back on track any other way.

Ray Queen says nobody told him about any of this.

“How does that happen?” Queen asked. “This is supposed to be a program that you all have to help people in times of crisis, so you don’t take their house from them.”

The Queens say they tried to come off their forbearance in February of this year and resume paying their mortgage. They were both working again. But they ran into delays with the mortgage company.

Then, in September, the couple says they were told they needed to come up with more than $22,000, which they don’t have, or either sell their house or get foreclosed on.

Their mortgage servicing company, Mr Cooper, said in a statement it “explored every possible avenue to work through a solution for this customer.” But it said the VA needs better loss-mitigation options and referred NPR to a letter from advocates, industry and veteran groups urging the VA to restart the PCP program.

The VA “has really let people down”

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has really let people down,” says Kristi Kelly, a consumer lawyer in Virginia who says she is hearing from a lot of other veterans in the same situation as Ray and Betsy Queen.

“The homeowners entered into COVID forbearances, they were made certain promises, and there were certain representations that were made,” says Kelly. “And the VA essentially pulled the rug out from under everybody.”

For some homeowners, ending the program may not mean foreclosure, but it still means a financial hardship.

“Many of these people have 2 or 3% interest rate loans,” Kelly says. With the PCP program they could keep that interest rate. But now, she says, the only way they’ll be able to save their home is to enter into a loan modification where the interest rate will be around today’s market rate of 7.5%.

“For most people, their payments will increase by $600 or $700 a month, because the VA has decided to end the partial claim program.”

Many homeowners can’t afford such a huge increase in their monthly payment.

According to the data firm ICE Mortgage Technology, 6,000 homeowners with VA loans who had COVID forbearances are currently in the foreclosure process. And 34,000 more are delinquent.

Kelly says most other homeowners in America — people with FHA loans, for instance, or loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — still have ways to avoid foreclosure by moving missed payments to the back of the loan term.

But homeowners with VA loans don’t, because the VA ended that program. So veterans are being treated worse than most other homeowners, Kelly said.

“Service members are in a position where they’re going to lose their home,” she says. “And for most people, that’s everything they work for — and all their wealth is in their homes.”

VA has a plan to help, but it could be too late

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it had no choice but to end the program.

“We had a short-term authority for that specific program during COVID,” says John Bell, executive director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Loan Guaranty Service. “It wasn’t part of our normal authority.”

Some in the industry think the VA did, in fact, have the authority to extend the program. But either way, it ended it.

Now, though, the VA is taking the situation seriously.

NPR has learned that the VA is working on a new program to replace the old one. It will work in a different way but to similar effect, to save people from foreclosure. Bell says it’s going to take four to five months to get it up and running.

That’s too long for many of those 6,000 VA homeowners already in the foreclosure process. Not to mention the many more who are delinquent.

Already, data shows that more VA homeowners have been heading into foreclosure since the VA ended its PCP program. The same is not true for FHA loans or loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Will the firetruck arrive too late?

With so many homeowners at risk, there’s growing pressure on the VA to stop foreclosing on veterans until it gets its fix up and running.

“There should be a pause on foreclosures,” says Steve Sharpe, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “Veterans should really be able to have an ability to access this program when it comes online because it’s been so long since they’ve had something that will truly work.

Sharpe says the VA could also restart the PCP program that it shut down. “They have the authority to do both,” he says.

Pausing foreclosures sounds like a good idea to veteran Ray Queen in Oklahoma.

“Let us keep paying towards our regular mortgage between now and then,” he says. “Then once the VA has that fixed we can come back and address the situation. That seems like the adult, mature thing to do, not put a family through hell.”

NPR repeated Ray Queen’s plea to John Bell at the VA directly. Bell said the VA is “exploring all options at this point in time.”

“We owe it to our veterans to make sure that we’re giving them every opportunity to be able to stay in the home,” Bell said.

Ray and Becky Queen are hoping the VA does let people keep their homes until the new program can offer them a way to get current on their mortgages. Because if the firetruck shows up after the house has burned down, it’s not going to do much good for the thousands of veterans and service members who need help now.