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Ongoing issues with air travel will only get worse in the weeks leading into the busy holiday season, a senior Trump official warned Sunday. Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” NationalTransportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the Federal Aviation Administration’s flight reductions amid the government shutdown will not improve until the government reopens. “It’s only going to get worse,” Duffy said. “I look to the two weeks before Thanksgiving. You’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle.” “We have a number of people who want to get home for the holidays, they want to see their family, they want to celebrate this great American holiday,” he added. “Many of them are not going to be able to get on an airplane.” Duffy said there were 81 shortage “triggers,” or cases where air traffic controller staffing fell below permitted levels, across the country yesterday. In Atlanta alone, 18 or 22 controllers didn’t report for work, Duffy said. “We’re working overtime to make sure that it is safe to travel,” he said. “And so if we have staffing triggers in all locations, what we’ll do is we will slow traffic, which means you’ll have delays, and then airlines might cancel flights.” The FAA announced last week it was reducing air traffic by 10% across 40 “high-volume” markets as a result of the staffing issues. The impacted airports include busy travel hubs like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Dallas/Fort Worth International, Ronald Reagan Washington National, Orlando International and New York’s John F. Kennedy International. Air traffic controllers are among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees either working without pay or furloughed since the government shutdown started Oct. 1.
