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Duffy Holds a Press Conference at LaGuardia Airport, Oct. 28, 2025

October 28, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:27:14

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy held a press conference at LaGuardia Airport during the government shutdown, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside NATCA President Nick Daniels and working air traffic controllers whom Duffy presented, as he put it, as the men and women who keep flights safe and on time and who were not being paid. He told the story of a controller whose young daughter had made a traveling volleyball team the family could no longer afford to let her join, and said such stories were playing out across the controller community as paychecks stopped.

Duffy said controllers needed to show up for work — and that he would not pretend they were not feeling the stress of working as sole income earners without pay. He put the operational effect in figures as he stated them: delays associated with controller staffing averaged 5 percent in a normal year; on Sunday 44 percent of delays were staffing-driven, and the day before the briefing the figure was 24 percent. The system, he said, was about 2,000 to 3,000 controllers short.

Why it matters

The LaGuardia stop is the human face of the shutdown aviation brief, staged with the controllers themselves beside the Secretary: the delay-share figures — 5 percent normally, 44 percent at the shutdown’s height that week — are the measure Duffy used in public for what an unpaid control workforce does to the network, a week before the capacity cuts announced November 5.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the staffing-driven delay shares stated at LaGuardia — 44 percent on Sunday and 24 percent the following day, against a 5 percent normal average. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Holds Press Conference at LaGuardia Airport” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the press conference.