FAA grounding 10% of US flights in 40 cities as historic shutdown drags on

Watch FAA grounding 10% of US flights in 40 cities as historic shutdown drags on - New York Post on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Our air traffic controllers, and a lot of those who work at DOT, but throughout government,

00:04they haven't received paychecks. And many of these employees, they're the head of household.

00:10They have their spouse at home, they have a child or two or three, and when they lose income,

00:16they are confronted with real-world difficulties in how they pay their bills. And so for air

00:22traffic controllers, they received a partial payment in early October. The second payment,

00:28they got a big fat zero, no paycheck at all. Tomorrow, they get a pay stub email on what their

00:35next paycheck is going to be. And when that pay stub comes out, that is also going to be zero.

00:41So they will have gone a month without any pay. And what we're finding is that our air traffic

00:47controllers, because of the financial pressures at home, are taking side jobs. They need to put food

00:53in the table, gas in the car, pay their bills. By the way, I do not want them to take side jobs.

00:59I want them to show up for work. We have asked them to show up for work, but I'm not naive to

01:04understand that they're trying to figure out how they meet their daily obligations.

01:10And so because of that, we have seen staffing pressures throughout our airspace.

01:15Those who travel will see that we've had more delays. We've had more cancellations.

01:21We do not want to see disruptions at the FAA or here at DOT. We don't want that. But our number

01:27one priority is to make sure when you travel, you travel safely. And that's why, as the administrator

01:35and I have been talking throughout the day, his team has been working for the last 24, 36,

01:4148 hours crunching data. We're noticing that there's additional pressure that's building in

01:48the system. And again, our priority is to make sure that you're safe. And so we're going to talk

01:54about additional measures that we are going to take that's going to reduce the risk profile

01:59in the national airspace. And I'm going to turn it over to the administrator to do that. As he walks

02:05through what that plan is going to look like, I anticipate there will be additional disruptions.

02:10There will be frustration. We are working with the airlines. They're going to work with

02:15passengers. But in the end, our sole role is to make sure that we keep this airspace as safe

02:22as possible. The administrator is going to talk about all of the tools we're going to deploy.

02:28One of them, though, is going to be that there is going to be a 10% reduction in capacity at

02:3440 of our locations. The administrator is going to tell you that this is data-based.

02:40This is not based on what airline travels, has more flights out of what location. This

02:47is about where is the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure.