Transport Secretary Sean Duffy has said it is “not your imagination” that air travel in the U.S. has gotten worse.
The former competitive lumberjack presided over a historically turbulent period during the shutdown, when thousands of flights were canceled. It saw schedules reduced by 10 percent across 40 “high traffic” markets nationwide in early November to maintain air safety and address the crippling shortage of air traffic controllers.
But the 54-year-old told travellers that they were responsible for ensuring a “golden age of travel” by saying “please and thank you” and “dressing with respect.”
“It’s not your imagination,” Duffy said in the caption of the video posted on X. “Traveling has become more uncivilized!”
The former congressman used the medium of unsocked feet to prove his point, in a nostalgia-drenched video that included clips of incidents at airports and on planes.
It opened to virtuoso crooner Frank Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ where a faux retro recording discussed the last “golden age of air travel.” It then proclaimed, “We respected the dignity of air travel… flying was a bastion of civility.”
Cut to modern times, and Duffy’s video flicked between a clip of exposed feet on the back of a seat, and then exposed feet as they flicked through onboard entertainment systems.
From here, it strung together a montage of unruliness, from mid-air meltdowns to airport brawls. It even included a passenger ripping off a crew member’s lapel with their teeth.
“Manners don’t stop at the gate,” Duffy, a former star of MTV’s The Real World: Boston, said superimposed over an airport and framed in a vintage TV set. “Things aren’t what they used to be. Some would call it the golden age of travel. Let’s bring civility and manners back.
“Ask yourself, are you helping a pregnant woman put her bag in the overhead bin? Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children?” the father of nine asked.
“Are you saying please and thank you to your flight attendants? Are you saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in general? The golden age of air travel begins with you,” he added, with a theatrical point through the fourth wall.
Duffy’s tenure as President Donald Trump’s top transportation official has been riddled with catastrophe. Amid the paring back of flights during the government shutdown, Federal Aviation Administration boss Bryan Bedford said, “I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” the Associated Press reports.
Duffy claimed at the time that air traffic controllers were being forced to take second jobs to make up for missed paychecks.
In a news conference at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on November 11, he then warned there could be repercussions for controllers who didn’t “show up” during the lapse in funding.
“My concern is, for those air traffic controllers who, before they missed a paycheck, and were in the shutdown, they decided on a continual basis not to show up for work,” he said, according to Business Insider.
Prior to the shutdown ending, Duffy had warned the number of Americans unable to see their families over Thanksgiving could be “substantial.”
In the hours before the shutdown ended, USA Today reported that 8,700 flights had been delayed, and 2,300 had been cancelled.
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