Bernie Sanders calls out potential 2024 presidential rival Transportation Secreraty Pete Buttigieg over flight cancellations, delays

[basquebromance]

If Pete Buttigieg was a straight dude, he wouldn’t have been a Presidential candidate. Being South Bend Mayor doesn’t qualify you to be Pres. And Bernie Sanders is understanding it doesn’t really qualify you to be Secretary of Transportation either.

Bernie Sanders calls out potential 2024 presidential rival Buttigieg over flight cancellations, delays

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is furthering his calls for Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg to take action to address flight delays and cancellations, as well as high costs.

www.foxnews.com

 

[basquebromance]

Air travel is a hot mess. There’s not much the government can do about it.

Prepare for another bruising holiday weekend at 30,000 feet — if you don't get delayed.

www.politico.com

excerpts:

The airline industry may be booming, but flying is arguably worse than ever, with cancellations and delays rampant — and more disruptions predicted for the busy July Fourth weekend.

And there’s not much the federal government can do about it.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently called airline CEOs to a meeting to talk about how to ease the waves of delays and cancellations that have stranded thousands of passengers this summer — during the Juneteenth-Father’s Day weekend, some 3,000 flights were canceled and tens of thousands more delayed. But so far, talking is all that’s happened.

“Our preferred way to deal with these issues is partnership,” Buttigieg said at an industry lunch on Wednesday. He added that DOT will “use whatever authorities are available to us to ensure the customers have a good experience.”

But so far the administration has been hesitant to flex its authorities to compel action, beyond expediting flight refunds and using its bully pulpit.

At the lunch, Buttigieg suggested that so far the administration hopes airlines can handle the problem themselves. He observed that airlines have been actively canceling flights and adjusting schedules to try to avoid last-minute disruptions, so “our hope is before resorting to measures like that the problem can be solved on the front end.”

Buttigieg sat down with NBC News this week, admitting “there are going to be challenges” during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, with AAA predicting more than 3.5 million Americans will fly. (He recently had his own flight problems — his flight was canceled Father’s Day weekend. He instead opted to drive from Washington, D.C., to New York.)

Some lawmakers have called for DOT to start fining airlines when they schedule flights they know they won’t be able to staff, which then inevitably are canceled. That includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is asking DOT to start fining airlines $55,000 per passenger for every flight canceled due to foreseeable staffing problems, as well as fines for delays of more than two hours and refunds for delays of more than an hour.

“While the price of airline tickets have skyrocketed by 38 percent over the last year, airline delays have increased by 50 percent and cancellations are up by 18 percent compared to where they were before the pandemic,” Sanders wrote in a letter to Buttigieg. “So far this year, one out of every five flights in the United States were delayed.”

“This is simply unacceptable,” Sanders continued, especially considering the $54 billion in pandemic assistance American taxpayers gave to the airline industry.

 

[Penelope]

He sent a letter to him not an email. What are you going to do about gas,

and a lot of pilots retired the pandemic when they were forced to retire at age 65

If their not begrudging Sanders they are now begrudging Buttigieg.

I don't know about Fox and the news they put out, it's dumb.

 

[wamose]

Wholesale incompetence is what happened when Biden based most of his appointments on skin color, sex and sexual orientation and took nearly all his marching orders from the radical Marxists that run the D party today. Buttigieg is an idiot but Bernie is a commie who has no room to speak.

 

[gipper]

Big deal.

Bernie isn’t running again. He’d be 83 years old. Plus the D Party cheated him of the nomination twice, why would he expect they wouldn’t cheat him again?

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

He sent a letter to him not an email. What are you going to do about gas,

and a lot of pilots retired the pandemic when they were forced to retire at age 65

If their not begrudging Sanders they are now begrudging Buttigieg.

I don't know about Fox and the news they put out, it's dumb.

Link?