Thousands of US flights canceled — again

A winter storm hitting the mid-atlantic combined with the pandemic to further frustrate air travelers whose return flights home from the holidays were canceled or delayed in the first few days of the new year.

More than 2,600 U.S. flights and more than 4,100 worldwide were grounded Monday, according to tracking service Flightaware. Another 8,500 flights were delayed, including 3,100 in the United States.

Travelers could take hope from an improving weather forecast. Airlines canceled fewer than 300 U.S. flights scheduled for Tuesday.

First, however, they had to contend with a winter storm Monday that was expected to bring as much as 10 inches of snow for the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia and central Maryland.

With the spread of the omicron variant, the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. has tripled over the past two weeks and topped 400,000 Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The toll of grounded flights in the U.S. was in the few hundreds per day the week before Christmas, then soared past 1,000 a day.

For several days, airlines and their passengers lucked out with mostly favorable weather, but a storm that hit the Midwest on Saturday caused cancellations to spike again to new highs.

Over the weekend, about 5,400 U.S. flights were canceled — nearly 12% of all scheduled flights — and more than 9,000 worldwide, according to Flightaware. Many of the cancellations were made hours or even a day in advance. Airlines believe they have a better chance to keep lighter schedules on track when there are disruptions such as snow or thunderstorms.

Airlines are paying bonuses to encourage pilots and flight attendants to pick up flights left empty by co-workers with COVID-19. United will pay pilots triple their usual wages for picking up open flights through most of January. Spirit Airlines reached a deal with the union to pay flight attendants double through Tuesday.