New York (AFP) – Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Thursday that US air travel is recovering after the disruptions caused by the more than month-long government funding shutdown. “Yesterday was one of the best days our airspace had in a while with just a few air traffic controllers calling out from work,” he said on his X account on Friday. “We are reviewing the data provided and working hard for a return to normal airspace operations,” he added.
Flight traffic limits had been set in place as a consequence of the record-long US budget shutdown, which began on October 1 and ended on Wednesday. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees were furloughed while others, considered essential, were called to work without pay. Among the latter were thousands of air traffic controllers, but absenteeism increased among a workforce that was already suffering from staff shortages before the shutdown.
Still, as traffic returns to normal, the six percent reduction in domestic flights at twelve high-traffic airports, implemented on November 13 by the US aviation regulator (FAA), remained in place until further notice. But according to Cirium, an aviation data provider, only two percent of scheduled flights on Friday morning in the US had been canceled. The airports in Atlanta, Chicago-O’Hare, Newark, Dallas Fort Worth, and Denver were the most affected with about twenty cancellations each.
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