Air traffic in the United States will be reduced “to almost zero” due to the shutdown. The American Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said this in an interview with CNN. “Air traffic is going to be slowed down a lot as everyone wants to travel to see their families” ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday that begins in two weeks, Duffy told Fox News. “We will see very few air traffic controllers showing up for work, which means there will be few flights departing and arriving… There will be huge disruption and a lot of angry Americans.”
According to Duffy, air traffic will progressively be reduced to “just a few flights” due to the budget freeze which continues and leads the authorities to reduce the number of flights due to the shortage of air traffic controllers. These disruptions, which affect only domestic flights, have become the main focus of the ongoing political battle between Republicans and Democrats over the federal budget, with each side trying to blame the other for the inconveniences suffered by travelers across the country. Since Friday, the US aviation regulator, the FAA, has been asking airlines to reduce their schedules, causing the cancellation of more than a thousand flights a day, amounting, at this point, to about 4% of American air traffic, as a major exodus in the country approaches.
“Air traffic is going to be drastically reduced just when everyone wants to travel to see their families” for the traditional Thanksgiving holiday at the end of November, Sean Duffy told Fox News. “There will be fewer air traffic controllers at work, meaning only a handful of flights will be able to take off and land,” he added. Since the beginning of October, the United States has been in a “shutdown” situation, the longest paralysis in the country’s history, as Democratic and Republican lawmakers are unable to reach an agreement on the budget. Since then, hundreds of thousands of federal officials have worked without pay, including air traffic controllers. Some of them “will be faced with the idea of looking for a second job to make ends meet, to buy food, get petrol, pay the rent”, the minister observed on CNN. “Yesterday, in Atlanta, 18 out of 22 controllers didn’t show up” for work, he cited as an example. These inconveniences are added to the increasingly long queues at airport security checks manned by security officers, who have also been without pay for over a month,” he concluded.