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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Wednesday that flight capacity at 40 major U.S. airports will be cut by 10 percent starting Friday morning if the government shutdown is not resolved.
“We’re noticing that there’s additional pressure that’s building in the system,” Duffy said at a news conference with Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford. The remarks came one day after a fatal crash of a United Parcel Service jet in Louisville, Kentucky.
Duffy and Bedford did not identify which 40 airports will see capacity limits. The shutdown, now over a month long and growing, has placed a heavy strain on the FAA. Air traffic controllers have been without pay for nearly five weeks, and many are missing work or taking second jobs to cover their expenses.
“Our priority is to make sure that you’re safe, and so we’re going to talk about additional measures that we are going to take that are going to reduce the risk profile in the national airspace,” Duffy said. “I anticipate there will be additional disruptions. There’ll be frustration. We are working with the airlines. They’re going to work with passengers. But in the end, our sole role is to make sure that we keep this airspace as safe as possible.”
He said one of the steps being taken “is going to be that there is going to be a 10% reduction in capacity at 40 of our locations.”
“This is not based on what airline travels have more flights out of what location,” Duffy said. “This is about where’s the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure.”
Earlier in the week, Duffy warned that the FAA could be forced to shut down airspace in certain areas if the shutdown lasts into next week.
Bedford said the FAA is closely monitoring the health of the National Airspace System. “For the most part, we’re happy to report that it is running as efficiently today, in terms of its safety metrics, as it was prior to the lapse,” he said.
“But as we dig deeper into the data, what we find are implementation issues of fatigue that our flight controllers are experiencing. We see that through voluntary safety disclosure reports coming in from commercial air transport pilots. That data has allowed us to focus not on the NAS as a whole, but on specific markets where we’re seeing some of these reports. And as we slice the data more granularly, we are seeing pressures build in a way that we don’t feel, if we allow it to go unchecked, will allow us to continue to tell the public that we operate the safest airline system in the world,” he continued.