Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy admitted Wednesday that he changed his wife’s flight reservation to avoid making her take off from Newark Liberty International Airport — just hours after claiming the troubled New Jersey hub was safe for the public.
Duffy, 53, told conservative SiriusXM radio host David Webb on Monday that his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, had been due to fly out of EWR the following day, but he had “switched her flight to LaGuardia.”
When the Transportation Secretary appeared before the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) suggested Duffy had “diverted your wife from Newark airport to LaGuardia out of a sense of security.”
“That’s not true,” Duffy began before revising his answer to “it’s partially true.”
“With all the delays at Newark — my wife had to do an event and she was in the city of New York, and so I did — I moved her from Newark to LaGuardia, not for safety but because I needed her flight to fly. She had to get there.”
Watson Coleman said that she accepted Duffy’s explanation.
On Monday, Newark airport saw scores of delays and cancellations after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop following an outage at one of its air traffic control facilities.
The day before appearing on Webb’s show, Duffy had gone on NBC News’ “Meet The Press” to insist that “it is” safe for travelers to fly out of Newark.
“I fly out of Newark all the time,” he told moderator Kristen Welker. “My family flies out of Newark.”
However, the transportation secretary admitted that officials had “brought down the number of airplanes that come in and leave Newark because, listen, our mission is safety.”
“Yeah, I hate delays. I hate cancellations. And I hate families who come with little kids that are sitting there for four hours. I’ve done that myself on occasion. It’s hard. But I want you to get to where you’re traveling. And if that means slowing down flights into Newark, we slow them down to make sure we can do it safely. We lost a few controllers who were stressed out by the first connectivity that we lost last week. And so we have less controllers working the Newark airspace right now. And, you know, we’re having these – these glitches in the system. So we slow it down and keep people safe.”
A New York-based air traffic controller told The Post the situation at Newark airport was “pure insanity,” with key operations functioning on a “bare bones” staff during the busiest nights.
Duffy has blamed the Biden administration for the recent chaos at the airport, accusing them of failing to oversee a smooth transition of Newark’s airspace to the troubled Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) back in July 2024.
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