STORMS, PANDEMIC GROUND MORE FLIGHTS
Wintry weather combined with the pandemic to frustrate air travelers whose return flights home from the holidays were canceled or delayed in the first days of the new year.
More than 2,500 U.S. flights and more than 4,100 worldwide were grounded Sunday, according to tracking service FlightAware.
That followed Saturday’s cancellations of more than 2,700 U.S. flights, and more than 4,700 worldwide.
“It was absolute mayhem,” said Natasha Enos, who spent Saturday night and Sunday morning at Denver International Airport during what was supposed to be a short layover on a crosscountry trip from Washington to San Francisco.
Saturday’s single-day U.S. toll of grounded flights was the highest since just before Christmas, when airlines began blaming staffing shortages on increasing COVID-19 infections among crews.
A winter storm that hit the Midwest on Saturday made Chicago the worst place in the country for travelers throughout the weekend. About a quarter of all flights at O’Hare International Airport were canceled Sunday.
Denver’s airport also faced significant disruptions. Enos, who was flying on Frontier Airlines, didn’t learn that her connecting f light home to California was canceled until she had already landed in Denver. Then it was a rush to find alternative flights and navigate through baggage claims packed with stranded and confused travelers, amid concerns about the spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant of COVID-19.
“It was a lot of people in a very small space and not everybody was masking,” said the 28-year-old financial analyst. “There were a lot of exhausted kids and some families were so stressed out.”
In Michigan, the authority that runs Detroit International Airport said crews were working around the clock to remove snow and maintain the airfield.
Southwest Airlines said it was working to help customers affected by about 400 flights canceled around the country Sunday, about 11 percent of its schedule. The Dallas-based airline anticipates even more operational challenges to come as the storm system pushes east.
Delta Air Lines said Sunday
it was issuing a travel waiver for planned flights this week out of mid-Atlantic airports in Baltimore and Washington in preparation for forecasted winter weather.
American Airlines said most of Sunday’s canceled flights had been canceled ahead of time to avoid disruptions at the airport.
SkyWest, a regional carrier that operates flights under the names American Eagle, Delta Connection and United Express, grounded nearly 500 flights Sunday, about 20 percent of its schedule.