Sean Duffy says flight delays, cancellations will continue amid government shutdown

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday that he expects flight delays and cancellations to continue as the ongoing government shutdown creates staffing shortages at airports nationwide.

“We will delay, we will cancel, any kind of flight across the national airspace to make sure people are safe,” he told ABC News’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday. “There is a level of risk that gets injected into the system when we have a controller that’s doing two jobs instead of one.”

“We don’t want crashes, we want people to go safely, and so we will slow and stop traffic if we don’t think we can manage it in a way that keeps people safe as they go from point A to point B,” he added.

He also warned that airport delays and cancellations could get worse if the shutdown continues.

“If the government doesn’t open in the next week or two, we’ll look back as these were the good days, not the bad days,” he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ground stop at Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday morning due to a shortage of air traffic controllers.

According to the flight-tracking site FlightAware, nearly 3,300 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. have been delayed so far Sunday, with almost 530 canceled.

Air traffic controllers have been working without pay during the ongoing shutdown. In a Friday statement, the FAA said “air traffic controllers are under immense stress and fatigue” after working for 31 days without pay.

“Currently, half of our Core 30 facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 80 percent of air traffic controllers are absent at New York-area facilities,” the statement read.

In a separate Sunday interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Duffy said he has encouraged air traffic controllers to come into work, but the shutdown has pushed them to make life decisions “they shouldn’t have to make.”

“They’re confronted with a decision: Do I put food on my kids’ table, do I put gas in the car, do I pay my rent, or do I go to work and not get paid? They’re making decisions,” he told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan.

Source: The Hill