Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy admitted to changing his wife’s travel plans to avoid Newark Airport amid a series of air traffic control failures and delays there, but said the decision was due to reliability concerns, not safety.
“With all the delays in Newark, my wife had to do an event and she was in the city of New York, and so I did. I moved her from Newark to LaGuardia. Not for safety, but because I needed her flight to fly. She had to get there,” he said before a House Transportation subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
Duffy, while taking questions from lawmakers, had been asked about an interview from Monday where he admitted to diverting his wife through New York City instead of New Jersey.
“My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow, I switched her flight to LaGuardia,” he told radio host David Webb in that SiriusXM interview. (It can be heard around the 9-minute mark.)
That clip “made it seem like I was talking about safety,” he said Wednesday of his comment to Webb while discussing snarled traffic and air traffic control issues.
Duffy’s confession immediately raised eyebrows, as he has repeatedly insisted that flying out of Newark is safe. That’s despite the airport’s air traffic control experiencing two radar and radio control blackouts within the last two weeks.
Duffy on Monday said that a software update prevented a third radar outage from occurring over the weekend.
Hundreds of flights have been canceled and delayed at the airport after the Federal Aviation Administration restricted air traffic into the airport amid the issues, which include staffing shortages and one runway being shut down due to construction.
Duffy told lawmakers on Wednesday that his department is working “at lightning speed” on upgrading the airport’s communication lines but that it’s going to take time not just because of infrastructure issues but because of the need to continue to slow air traffic and properly train staff, which he said can take a full year to do.
“You can’t fix this overnight. I can’t fix this in a couple months, this is going to take us a year, two years, three years,” he said.