Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained Wednesday that he recently changed his wife’s flight to avoid the embattled Newark Liberty International Airport — but not because of safety issues.
“With all the delays at 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,” Duffy told lawmakers during a House Transportation subcommittee hearing.
“Now, someone had clipped some audio of that and made it seem like I was talking about safety,” he added.
Duffy’s remarks come as the Newark Liberty airport has been thrust into the national spotlight in recent weeks over repeated delays while the airport deals with outdated technology and staffing challenges, chiefly among air traffic controllers.
The airport, one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area, has also been plagued by construction on parts of the runway — which has contributed to delays. The Transportation chief, however, said over the weekend that it is safe to fly in and out of the airport.
In late April, controllers at a Philadelphia air traffic control center who are responsible for overseeing air traffic coming in and out of the New Jersey airport lost communications and radar for 90 seconds. The same issue happened again briefly earlier this month, exacerbating concerns.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily slowed down air traffic at the airport on Sunday due to a new telecommunications issue that impacted the Philadelphia facility.
On Sunday, Duffy said the government has cut down the number of flights taking off from Newark airports as a result of the issues, stating on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” that “our mission is safety.”
“I hate delays. I hate cancellations,” he said. “But I want you to get to where you’re traveling. And if that means slowing down flights into Newark, we slow them down to make sure we can do it safely.”
Duffy also told House lawmakers on Wednesday that the FAA “has brought in together all of the airlines who serve Newark to have a conversation about how there can be a delayed reduction.”
“So, if you book your flight, that flight is going to fly. You don’t have people at the airport for, you know, two, four, six hours, then a flight canceled,” he said during the hearing. “So we’re working through that now, hopefully in the next week or two, we’ll have additional really good news about the telecom progress that we’ve made.”