The Transportation secretary said air traffic controllers can’t afford to miss another paycheck.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Tuesday said the government shutdown has injected “more risk” into air travel and warned of widespread flight cancellations and potentially closed airspace if air traffic controllers miss their second full paycheck next week.
Duffy told reporters at a press conference that controllers he has spoken with told him that some could manage missing one paycheck, but none could miss two paychecks, which would happen early next week if Congress doesn’t break the stalemate by then. Duffy predicted such a pressure point would inject chaos into the air system.
“If you bring us to a week from today, Democrats, you will see mass chaos,” Duffy said. “You will see mass flight delays. You will see mass cancellations. And you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have the air traffic controllers.”
While Duffy maintained the air travel system is safe and that his agency would slow traffic down in the case of significant air traffic controller staffing shortages, he did say the shutdown, which hit the 35-day mark Tuesday, is introducing more risk.
“We delay flights. We tell airlines to cancel flights if we don’t have enough controllers to effectively and safely manage our skies, but with this shutdown, it would be dishonest to say that more risk is not injected into the system,” Duffy said. “There is more risk in the system.”
If the system wasn’t safe, Duffy said he would “shut it down.”
While current air traffic controllers are going without pay, there has also been concern about the pipeline of new controllers being disrupted due to the lapse in appropriations.
DOT said earlier Tuesday it has found money to pay students through November at FAA’s air traffic controller academy. There are just under 600 students at the academy who earn around $22 an hour. Duffy didn’t provide specific numbers on where DOT was getting the money to pay controllers at the FAA academy and how much it would cost to pay them through the month.