Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy keeps going on TV and insisting it’s safe to fly in and out of Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey, despite a string of extremely frightening outages and workforce shortages recently. But Duffy has now admitted he changed a flight booked for his wife on Monday so that she wouldn’t have to travel through Newark.
Duffy made the startling admission to David Webb, a conservative radio host, during his SiriusXM show on Monday. And it’s a shocking thing to hear from the guy who’s supposed to make sure American air travel is safe.
“My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow. I switched her flight to LaGuardia,” Duffy told the host of The David Webb Show as they discussed the recent problems at the airport.
It’s not clear if Duffy really understood what he had just admitted to publicly. Because Duffy has repeatedly claimed that it’s perfectly safe to fly through Newark, even as things seem to be falling apart there.
Newark has had three significant tech outages in the past two weeks at the Philadelphia facility where air traffic is monitored for the New Jersey airport. Radar screens went black and radios fell silent on April 28 for about 30 seconds in an experience so harrowing that flight traffic controllers have taken trauma leave. Screens again went dark on May 9 for about 90 seconds, and on May 11, an equipment outage caused a group stop for 45 minutes.
The New York Times also reported late Monday that just three air traffic controllers were monitoring traffic at Newark during a shift that day when 14 should have been working. The paper reported that the number of “fully certified controllers” on duty was sometimes even just “one or two” during a shift.
Duffy was asked Tuesday morning on CNBC about Newark Airport specifically and appeared rather confident that it was safe.
“It’s safe and that’s because we have numerous redundancies in place at the FAA,” Duffy told CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin. “So when you have issues with your telecom, we slow down traffic, which is exactly what we’ve done at Newark. And then even if you lose telecom, like you saw twice in the last two weeks, there’s procedures in place with the air traffic controllers and for pilots. And so it’s safe.”
Duffy has repeatedly blamed President Joe Biden’s administration for the failures that have been experienced on his watch and deflected when asked about whether recent cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have played any role. DOGE fired hundreds of people at the FAA, but Duffy insists none of them were critical to the agency’s safety mission.
“We actually have staffed up. We’ve hired more air traffic controllers during this time,” Duffy said Sunday on Meet the Press. “There were probationary workers that were let go—those were employees who were there less than a year—and again, we excluded the safety positions… most of them have come back.”
His assertion has not been independently verified, and we’re forced to just take him at his word on that one. Members of the Trump regime aren’t exactly known for their honesty.
Republicans like Duffy also aren’t great at understanding how systems work. Many seem to believe that you can fire support staff and assume everything will continue operating smoothly. For example, the FDA under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently fired a bunch of staffers who booked flights and organized logistics for scientists who needed to conduct safety inspections in foreign countries like India, according to the Associated Press. Those people were vital to making sure the inspectors could do their jobs, something DOGE cost-cutters didn’t seem to get.
Reached for comment about Duffy’s cancelled flight for his wife, a spokesperson at the FAA told Gizmodo to ask the folks at the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA. DOT has not yet responded to our questions. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
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