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Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg jumped at the opportunity to slam the nationwide ground stop – despite being in charge when it last happened three years ago.
The 2020 presidential candidate – and potential 2028 contender – kicked off his public remarks at the “What’s Next” conference in Colorado Friday night by making a dig at the Federal Aviation Administration ground stop.
“I’ll begin with a public service announcement: I will be available in the hotel bar following the concert for anybody who needs to rebook their flights, or get a refund per your rights,” Buttigieg quipped.
He later told reporters he was watching things unfold “as a member of the traveling public who has a flight tomorrow” and was “very concerned about what’s going on.”
Shameless Buttigieg also defended his own transportation tenure during the Biden administration, insisting: “We did a lot to upgrade the system. When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work.”
“There needs to be answers and there needs to be transparency about what happened,” he added. “As a member of the flying public — as well as somebody who cares a lot about what goes on in the national airspace — I will have a lot of interest in getting answers, too.”
Asked his impressions of his successor Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s press conference addressing the issue by the New York Times at a hotel bar, Buttigieg said: “You can just write down the comic book asterisk swearing characters.”
“I have questions,” he added.
Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel tore into Buttigieg online, writing: “No one’s hands are clean here. However, Mr. Secretary Buttigieg, you had four years in the job and infrastructure money, yet made zero progress modernizing the FAA. You left a failing system in place.”
The Federal Aviation Administration had announced the unusual nationwide ground stop just before 4 p.m. Friday – prompting a wave of cancellations at some of the nation’s busiest travel hubs, including New York’s LaGuardia and JFK airports.
Just over four hours later, feds lifted the order and Duffy asked for $50 billion in additional funding to upgrade aging air traffic control and communications systems.
The transportation secretary also cautioned that it could take some time for commercial airline operations to fully return to normal, but expected things will be completely “back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving.”
Nationwide ground stops are extremely rare and have only been issued twice before: once in January 2023 — while Buttigieg was in charge of transportation — due to a broken pilot notification system, and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
