Transportation secretary warns about Thanksgiving air travel

WASHINGTON — A “substantial” number of Americans will likely miss Thanksgiving with their families because of air-travel snarls thanks to the government shutdown, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Sunday.

“Yesterday, 18 to 22 controllers in Atlanta didn’t show up. We had 81 staffing [shortage] ‘triggers’ throughout the national airspace yesterday,” Duffy told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“It’s only going to get worse. I look to the two weeks before Thanksgiving, you’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle,” he said.

Air-traffic controllers have been forced to work without pay since Oct. 1 because of the ongoing government shutdown, which reached its historic 40th day Sunday.

As a result, many of the controllers have had to pick up alternative gigs such as with Uber and DoorDash to make ends meet. Others are calling in sick or simply retiring early.

“I used to have about four controllers retire a day before the shutdown. I’m now up to 15 to 20 a day that are retiring,” Duffy said. “So it’s going to be harder for me to come back from that and have more controllers controlling the airspace.”

Before the shutdown, Duffy had been scrambling to modernize the country’s air-traffic-control system and rapidly train new controllers to deal with staffing shortages.

The transportation secretary warned that even after the end of the government shutdown, there will be lasting consequences from the closure on the air industry.

Last week, Duffy warned that up to 20% of flights could be scrapped in the coming weeks if the government shutdown rages on. Nearly 2,000 flights were cancelled Saturday, according to FlightAware.

Despite the government-shutdown-induced staffing snarls, Duffy stressed that air travel is still safe.

“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.”

All of this will likely come to a head around Thanksgiving, which is one of the busiest travel times of the year in the US.

“Many [wannabe fliers] are not going to be able to get on an airplane because there are not going to be that many flights that fly if this thing doesn’t open back up,” Duffy said.

“We have controllers who, again, are making decisions to feed their families,” he said. “The problem is, they’re confronted with real economic problems.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has announced plans to keep the upper chamber in session until lawmakers reach a deal to reopen the government.