After a long holiday weekend of flight cancellations due to airline staffing shortages, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated on Tuesday that he had no intention of raising the retirement age for pilots.
In an effort to prevent shortages, the industry raised the retirement age for commercial pilots from 55 to 65 years old 15 years ago.
However, the epidemic caused a surge of early retirements, and airlines are already expressing shortage concerns once more.
Despite the fact that Americans are living and working longer, like his 79-year-old boss Joe Biden, Buttigieg declared he would not raise the retirement age.
He told Fox News: “I’m much more interested in increasing the bar on things like pay and job quality than lowering the bar on something like safety.”
“And when you get to these training requirements, retirement ages, and other things, those are really just safety rules.”
“I will explore and entertain anything that does not jeopardize safety,” President Obama said. “The United States of America shouldn’t be able to have a vibrant aviation system without lowering our expectations on safety.”
Neil Cavuto, an anchor, pressed the issue further by asserting that “65 was the new 55” and “our president is almost 80.”
He answered, “That regulation is there for safety reasons.”
I haven’t come across any evidence or statistics that would indicate that the justification has changed.
Therefore, I’m going to consider different actions that don’t compromise safety.
He was speaking following a chaotic weekend of travel that resulted in several delays and cancellations.
Leading Democrats criticized Buttigieg for not taking sufficient action to prevent disturbance.
The Transport Security Administration estimates that around 2.5 million travellers were inspected on Friday, making it the biggest day at airports since the pandemic started.
During the busy Fourth of July weekend, at least 2,200 U.S. flights were cancelled by airlines, while another 25,000 planes had delays.
The culprits included bad weather, ineffective traffic management, and a manpower shortfall.
Additionally, this year has seen the highest number of airline delays in the previous ten years.
Last week, pilots protested at airports to demand higher pay. Their unions sent a warning before the commotion that airlines were planning more flights than they could staff.
They claim that in order to keep flight schedules on track, their members are working excessive amounts of overtime.
Buttigieg claimed that if he had delayed acting, the weekend may potentially have been worse.
I gathered the airlines together and asked them what actions they were doing and if there was anything we could do jointly to see changes by the July 4 holiday travel weekend because I was quite concerned about what happened over the Memorial Day weekend,’ he said.
The good news is that there were fewer cancellations and delays over the past travel weekend than there were over Memorial Day.
He continued by saying that he would make an effort to protect passengers.
He added, “We’re going to keep looking at the operational side to watch that number of delays and cancellations continue to go down because it’s not yet at a level that I consider acceptable.”
“We’re going to keep using our consumer protection enforcement authority to make sure that when that does happen to passengers that they are properly compensated,” he said.
Members of Buttigieg’s own party, including as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, had written letters last week urging him to act before the weekend.
Sanders encouraged Buttigieg to impose fines of $55,000 per passenger for flights delayed for longer than two hours, require airlines to reimburse passengers for delays of more than an hour, and penalize airlines that are unable to “fully staff” scheduled flights.
As expected, the weekend’s travel havoc worsened, prompting Sanders to use Twitter to once more challenge Buttigieg to come up with a solution.
“The taxpayers paid $54 billion to the airlines. They expressed their gratitude by raising ticket costs by 45 percent and leaving travellers stranded in congested airports.
Sanders wrote, “Enough.” It’s time for the Transportation Department to penalize underperforming airlines severely and issue full reimbursements for protracted delays.