Air travelers are feeling the impact of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history as they’re forced to deal with flight cancellations and delays due to a shortage of on-duty air traffic controllers. And flight travel is set to get a whole lot more inconvenient as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Wednesday that he is ordering a 10% cut in flights at 40 major U.S. airports, citing air traffic control safety concerns.
00:00But as we dig deeper into the data, what we find are issues of fatigue that our flight controllers are experiencing.
00:08And we see that through voluntary safety disclosure reports coming in from commercial air transport pilots.
00:14That data has allowed us to focus not on the NASA as a whole, but on specific markets where we're seeing some of these reports come to us.
00:22And as we slice the data more granularly, we are seeing pressures build in a way that we don't feel will, 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.
00:37And we're not going to react to that, and we intend to be proactive.
00:41So we're going to implement measures with our commercial airline industry partners.
00:46But this is going to go beyond commercial airspace.
00:49It's going to include restrictions on space launches, restrictions on VFR traffic in certain markets that have continued FAA controller staffing triggers and a host of other countermeasures, if you will, that will give us the highest level of comfort that we're maintaining the safest aviation space in the world.
01:08And that's the mission.
01:09But we do recognize that the controllers have been working fastidiously for the last five weeks with this huge burden over their head of lack of compensation.
01:20And we are starting to see some evidence that that fatigue is building in the system in ways that we feel we need to work towards relieving some of that pressure.
01:30So, again, as the Secretary said, we've identified 40 high-traffic environment markets.
01:36We'll be happy to share that later.
01:38We have decided that a 10 percent reduction in scheduled capacity would be appropriate to, again, continue to take the pressure off of our controllers.
01:48And as we continue to see staffing triggers, there will be additional measures that will be taken in those specific markets.
01:54I want to reiterate, this is proactive.
01:56We don't want to find ourselves in a situation, I think the administrator said, we don't want the horse out of the barn and then look back and say there were issues we could have taken that we didn't.
02:07So we are going to proactively make decisions that keep the airspace safe.
02:13And what we're finding is that our air traffic controllers, because of the financial pressures at home, are taking side jobs.
02:20They need to put food on the table, gas in the car, pay their bills.
02:24By the way, I do not want them to take side jobs.
02:27I want them to show up for work.
02:29We have asked them to show up for work, but I'm not naive to understand that they're trying to figure out how they meet their daily obligations.
02:38And so because of that, we have seen staffing pressures throughout our airspace.
02:44Those who travel will see that we've had more delays.
02:47We've had more cancellations.
02:49We do not want to see disruptions at the FAA or here at DOT.
02:54We don't want that.
02:55But our number one priority is to make sure when you travel, you travel safely.
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