Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday that he expects flight delays and cancellations to continue as the ongoing government shutdown creates staffing shortages at airports nationwide.<\/p>\n
“We will delay, we will cancel, any kind of flight across the national airspace to make sure people are safe,” he told ABC News’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday. “There is a level of risk that gets injected into the system when we have a controller that’s doing two jobs instead of one.”<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want crashes, we want people to go safely, and so we will slow and stop traffic if we don\u2019t think we can manage it in a way that keeps people safe as they go from point A to point B,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
He also warned that airport delays and cancellations could get worse if the shutdown continues.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the government doesn\u2019t open in the next week or two, we\u2019ll look back as these were the good days, not the bad days,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ground stop<\/a> at Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday morning due to a shortage of air traffic controllers.<\/p>\n According to the flight-tracking site FlightAware<\/a>, nearly 3,300 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. have been delayed<\/a> so far Sunday, with almost 530 canceled.<\/p>\n