Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that flight capacity at 40 major U.S. airports will be reduced by 10% beginning Friday morning if the government shutdown has not ended.
"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, addressing Tuesday's fatal crash of a United Parcel Service jet in Louisville, Kentucky.
Neither Duffy nor Bedford gave details on the 40 locations affected by the capacity restrictions. The government shutdown, now in its 36th day, has strained the FAA as air traffic controllers have gone almost five weeks without pay, and many are either not reporting for work or have taken second jobs to make ends meet.
"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."
Duffy added that one of the tools being deployed "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," he said. "This is about where's the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure."
Duffy reportedly said earlier this week that the FAA will be forced to shut down airspace in some locations if the shutdown continues into next week.
"What we have been monitoring on a daily basis — frankly, hourly — is looking at all of the metrics that we use to surveil the NAS [National Airspace System] and its health and well-being," Bedford said. "And 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.
"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."
Bedford said the restrictions will go beyond commercial airspace and include space launches, as well as "VFR [Visual Flight Rules] traffic in certain markets that have continued FAA controller staffing triggers and a host of other countermeasures that will give us the highest level of comfort that we're maintaining the safest aviation space in the world, and that's the mission."
He was asked how officials arrived at the 10% figure and whether they considered higher or lower numbers.
"I can tell you a whole panoply of options were evaluated," he said. "There's no perfect science here, so it's really trying to look at where the potential pressure points are building, what we're seeing in terms of safety disclosure reporting from our commercial air transport pilots — that's informing us. And then as we get into the granular details on these 40 individual markets, we felt like this was the appropriate next step. That doesn't mean that we won't come in and surgically do more if more is required, or if we see maybe we've overcorrected, we can certainly take some of the mitigation out."
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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