The Federal Aviation Administration announced Wednesday that 10% of air traffic at 40 U.S. airports will be cut starting Friday, if the government shutdown continues.
- “This is going to lead to more cancellations,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a press conference today. “We’re going to work with the airlines to do this in a systematic way.”
Matt Coughlin, the director of Pensacola International Airport, has not seen the list of airports, so he could not give a definitive answer on how the 10% cut would impact our airport.
“I would just say that if it were a direct correlation, that would impact 10% of our flights coming in and out of those airports. But there’s no real list of those airports, so it’s hard to discern how it’s going to impact us,” Coughlin said. So the operational impacts are unknown at this time.”
He added, “I would say that thus far during this shutdown, we’ve pretty much been unscathed.”
We will have more as this story develops.