Welcome to the NewsHour. The Federal Aviation Administration laid out a plan today to cut as much as 10% of flights operating out of 40 major airports, starting at a lower level tomorrow and ramping up over the coming week. Today, airlines already preemptively canceled hundreds of flights in response. Many of the airports in the plan are among the nation's

busiest, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, and the New York

and Washington, D.C. metro areas. The Trump administration said the move was triggered by the

government shutdown and is necessary for safety. Airports have faced delays as air traffic controllers working without pay have been calling in sick.

Staff shortages have also led to longer security lines in Houston and elsewhere.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained his reasoning yesterday.

I'm concerned about disrupting people's travel.

We're coming into a weekend.

That doesn't, listen, I travel, I travel a lot. We are concerned about that.

But we had to have a gut check of what is our job?

Is it to make sure there's minimal delays or minimal cancellations?

Or is our job to make sure we make the hard decisions to continue to keep the airspace safe?

Joining me now to break all of this down is David Shepardson of Reuters News. Good to see you.

Thank you.

Let's just start with this. Have we ever seen anything like this before in a government shutdown?

It's unprecedented. And certainly in the 2019 shutdown, if you remember, that went about this level, 35 days,

and that was credited, that shutdown was credited with the end by the big disruption in aviation

caused by controllers calling in sick in New York and DC.

But the government did not take this extraordinary step of ordering the airlines to cut flights during that shutdown.

And we're seeing airlines already taking steps to cancel some of those. What else are you hearing for them about how they're going to do this and their concerns?

Well, it's been pretty rough 24 hours for them, right? Because this came out roughly, I think, 4 o'clock yesterday, and they've been struggling to figure out how do we cancel flights?

Now, initially the government said it was going to be 10% Friday.

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