Tuesday 5 July 2022 11:30 PM Pete Buttigieg insists he WON'T raise the pilot retirement age above 65 when ... trends now Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday he had no intention of raising the retirement age for pilots after a holiday weekend of flight cancellations amid airline staffing shortages. The industry increased the age limit 15 years ago for commercial pilots to 65 years as they moved to head off forecasts of shortages. But the pandemic triggered a wave of early retirements and airlines are once again complaining of shortages. Buttigieg said he would not raise the retirement age, even though Americans are living and working longer - like his 79-year-old boss Joe Biden. 'I'm much more interested in raising the bar on things like compensation and job quality than lowering the bar on something like safety,' he told Fox News. 'And when you get to these training hours, retirement age, and those things, those are fundamentally safety regulations. 'The United States of America shouldn't be able to have a robust aviation system without watering down our expectations on safety and I will consider and entertain anything that does not compromise safety.' Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on Fox News to defend his record and explain why travel was disrupted over the holiday weekend. He said he had no plans to raise the retirement age for pilots beyond 65 to ease staffing shortages More than 2000 flights were canceled over the holiday weekend and thousands more delayed The Fourth of July brought the busiest travel weekend since the pandemic began Since holiday weekend travel picked up last Thursday, airlines have canceled more than 2,200 U.S. flights, and another 25,000 have been delayed Anchor Neil Cavuto probed further, saying that '65 was the new 55 and we have a president who's almost 80.' 'That regulation is there for safety reasons,' he said. 'I haven't seen any piece of information or data that would suggest that the reasoning has changed. And so I'm going to look at at other steps that are not affecting safety.' He was speaking after a busy weekend of travel that brought disruption and cancelations for many travelers. Leading Democrats slammed Buttigieg for failing to do enough to head off disruption. Close to 2.5 million passengers were screened on Friday, according to the Transport Security Administration, making it the busiest day at airports since the pandemic began. Airlines canceled at least 2,200 U.S. flights during the busy Fourth of July weekend, and another 25,000 were delayed. Weather, traffic control problems and staffing shortages were all blamed. Some travelers took to Twitter to blast the airlines. One parent slammed American Airlines for stranding their daughter Another Twitter user lamented about being stranded after their flight was canceled And more flights have been delayed this year than at any other time in the past decade. Pilots picketed airports last week to ask for better pay. Ahead of the chaos, their unions warned that airlines were scheduling more flights than they could staff. They say that their members are being overworked with overtime in order to keep flights schedules running. However, Buttigieg said the weekend could still have gone worse if he had not taken action earlier. 'I was very concerned with what happened over the Memorial Day weekend, got the airlines together, asked them what steps they were taking, anything that that we could do collaboratively to see improvements by the July 4 holiday travel weekend,' he said. 'The good news is this last travel weekend went better than Memorial Day did in terms of delays and cancellations.' He added that he would try to ensure that passengers were protected. 'We're going to continue using our consumer protection enforcement authority to make sure that when that does happen to passengers that they are properly compensated, as well as looking at the operational side to watch that number of delays and cancellations continue to go down because it's not yet at a level that I consider acceptable,' he said. Buttigieg had been urged to take action ahead of the weekend by members of his own party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who sent out letters last week. Sanders urged Buttigieg to require airlines to refund passengers for flights delayed more than an hour, impose fines of a rate of $55,000 per passenger for flights delayed for more than two hours, and fines for airlines that cannot 'properly staff' scheduled flights. As travel chaos escalated over the weekend as feared, Sanders took to Twitter to once again called out Buttigieg to set a plan in motion. 'The airlines got $54 billion in taxpayer money. They said thanks by jacking up ticket prices 45% & stranding passengers at crowded airports. Enough,' Sanders wrote. 'It's time for the Transportation Department to impose massive fines on poor-performing airlines & full refunds for long delays.' All rights reserved for this news site (dailymail) and under his responsibility