Buttigieg blames severe weather for holiday weekend flight cancellations

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday blamed severe weather for the large number of flight cancellations causing headaches for travelers ahead of the holiday weekend.

“They really shot up at the first part of the week, largely because of severe weather hitting some of our key hubs,” Buttigieg told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.” “I think most passengers understand that no one can control the weather, but anything that’s under the control of the airlines and anything that we can do on the FAA side, we need to continue pushing to make sure that there’s the smoothest possible experience for air passengers everywhere.”

More than 2,000 flights were delayed as the Fourth of July holiday weekend kicked off on Saturday. Severe weather cancelled and delayed hundreds of flights on the East Coast at the beginning of last week, but the issues remained after the weather passed. Some airlines have blamed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for poor staffing levels.

“Well, if you look at the overall picture, we’ve seen a lot of improvements but we had a hard few days with severe weather at the beginning of the week,” Buttigieg said. “And that definitely put enormous pressure on the system. Now the good news is on Friday we saw according to [Transportation Security Administration], a record number of airline passengers probably the most ever in America, and we saw those cancellation rates stay low.”

Even as some airlines blamed the FAA, Buttigieg said Sunday that less than 10 percent of delays are due to staffing issues. He said that the Transportation Department is set to hire 1,500 more air traffic controllers this year and an additional 1,800 next year to help address staffing issues.

“Well, first of all, let me be very clear that even according to the industry’s own data, air traffic control staffing issues account for less than 10 percent of the delay minutes in the system, but I would rather that number be zero,” he said. “So even though this isn’t the number one cause or even the number two cause of flight disruptions, it is something that is very important to tackle and we’re doing exactly that.”