11 07 25 Durango La Plata Airport's Tony Vicari on impact of the government shutdown

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now on Colorado's Morning News. The FAA mandated flight cutbacks
may be originating at the country's forty highest volume airports,
but smaller regional airports are still feeling the ripple effects.
Kaoi's Connor Streeve spoke to the aviation director at Durango
Laplata County Airport, Tony Vicery about it.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, so, as you know, the announcement by the FA
was targeted at the forty essentially highest volume markets around
the country. And I think when folks read that from
a title perspective, they say, oh, that's really only impacting
me if I live in Denver, Dallas, you know, any
other large market. But the reality is those function as
hub markets that touch centially every market in the country,

(00:39):
including regional markets such as Durango. So we are seeing
some real time cancelations as a result of this, definitely
starting to cause some impacts.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Will the regional airports maybe kind of run the risk
of feeling cut off during that Do you think that
risk might happen as this thing stretches. Who knows how
many days it's going to stretch.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Right, It's certainly a valid concern. The messaging from the
FA on this has been to the airlines has been
to not disproportionately affect a certain market segment, a certain destination,
et cetera. And there's been some specific wording around not
disproportionately affecting regional environments. But by the very nature, when

(01:21):
you get to a regional market which is smaller with
less overall frequencies, flight interruptions have significant impacts. You know,
when you talk about canceling one flight in Durango, that
represents a much more significant percentage of our overall seat
capacity out of the market than one flight out of
a major pub such as Denver might. And so consequently,

(01:43):
what that does is causes a domino effect. In a
singular day, those impacts might not be dramatic. The airlines
could potentially reaccommodate those on the canceled flight by shifting
them to open seats on another flight that they operate
during the day, and it might be a manageable situation.
Hit the nail on the head. The longer this goes,
the more the worse the impacts get, because you have

(02:04):
that domino effect where folks are no longer able to
be accommodated because there aren't enough open seats to make
up for the cancelations, and then if that starts to
run day after day after day, you get into a
situation where there's just not enough capacity to be able
to manage the demand in your market. So hopefully we
won't see that in this situation, will be remedied sooner

(02:26):
rather than later.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
That's Tony the Kerrey, Aviation director at the Durango, Laplota
County Airport. Yesterday, airports had their worst day of air
travel disruptions, with more than ten thousand flights delayed twenty
nine hundred canceled, according to flight Aware. Locally Denver dealing
with about forty six delays seventy cancelations so far this morning,
speaking on CNN's State of the Union, Transportation Secretary Sean

(02:48):
Duffy said there could be more air travel disruptions as
the shutdown continues too.

Speaker 4 (02:54):
You know, the two weeks before Thanksgiving, you're going to
see air travel be reduced to a truckle. We have
a number of people who want to get home for
the holidays, They want to see their family, they want
to celebrate this great American holiday. Listen, many of them
are not going to be able to get.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
On an airplane reductions went into effect on Friday at
forty the high traffic airports. They'll continue to ramp up
to ten percent of the cuts by this Friday