Chris Sununu

Well, look, I think the airlines handled it amazingly, especially for the first 30 or 40 days.

There were actually very few cancellations at the time, if you remember.

Things slowed down.

There were some delays, but we did get people where they were going, even though there were a lot of air traffic controller call-outs and all that.

I think they did an amazing job there.

When the forced cancellations came in that last week where the government said you have to cancel certain flights, the big challenge there was actually making sure the plane from, let's say, Boston to Kansas City that would later go on to L.A., if you cancel that first leg, there's no actual plane to take people from Kansas City to L.A.

So they were moving crews, they were moving assets, they were moving everything around, and it was a logistic circus, but they did a great job, I think, in terms of making sure it was there.

And that leads us to the holiday, right?

And so it's going to be busy.

It's going to be exciting, but the airlines are ready.

It's been a heavy, heavy year, but they're growing and they're ready to handle the capacity.

Well, there's not a crisis right now per se.

I think there's a lack of controllers and we're trying to get more people in the system, make sure that the training is there, the expertise is there, and that process speeds up.

There's a lot of delays in it that just aren't really necessary.

So I think what the FAA administrator, Brian Bedford, Sean Duffy, they get it.

And they are kind of breaking down a lot of the bureaucracy and those barriers to encourage more people to come in

to make sure they get certified faster, get them in the towers, and keep the whole system more resilient.

And at the same time, you have this thing called air traffic control modernization.

We're getting away from, I mean, literally floppy disks and paper strips and this old school coding that is really from the early 90s.

The government just hasn't done their part up until now of kind of updating that system.