Transportation Secretary Duffy describes potentially dangerous skies in final days of shutdown

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Tuesday that pilots and commercial airlines are reporting potentially perilous circumstances due to the stress that the government shutdown has placed on air traffic controllers nationwide.

Mr. Duffy said Democrats who did not win control of Congress or the White House “leveraged the American people and leveraged the airspace to get their way, get their will.” 

Talking to reporters, Mr. Duffy said he and his team reviewed recent data and noted instances of “loss of separation,” which occurs between airborne aircraft whenever the specified minimum separation in controlled airspace is breached.

“There’s safe distances that airplanes need to maintain in the airspace. We saw incursions in that separation. Now, was it a near miss? No, but there were incursions, also separation,” Mr. Duffy said.

“So that’s the first thing we saw. That data was going in the wrong direction. We saw it in runway incursions,” which are instances when aircraft, other vehicles, or people are incorrectly on the protected area of a runway.

Air traffic controllers were being squeezed even before the government shutdown. The Federal Aviation Administration was short of its targeted staffing goals by about 3,500 controllers.

“And then I had complaints from pilots and the airlines,” Mr. Duffy said. “Pilots were saying, ‘Hey, FAA, I’m having different experiences with the controller. They’re not responding to me as quickly.’”

“They seemed stressed, or they would say, ‘The letters the controllers and pilots use are a very specific language. The language…the controller was using, was getting sloppy. All those numbers were going in the wrong direction.’ Which means the risk levels are going up.”

Mr. Duffy said it was necessary to delay and cancel flights during the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, to ensure the safety of the airspace and runways.

The FAA ordered domestic airlines last week to reduce 4% of their flights at 40 major airports to alleviate the stress caused by the government shutdown.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 flights within the U.S. had been canceled by the afternoon, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, and more than 2,000 flights had been delayed.