Winter storms are wreaking havoc on air travel already this year, with record cancellations at airports up and down the East Coast.
Nearly 8,000 flights were canceled worldwide during a cluster of winter storms that struck the mid-Atlantic states over the first weekend of the year. Another 13,000 were delayed, leaving many thousands of travelers stuck in airports. This continued a trend that began with a rare white Christmas in the Pacific Northwest – from Christmas through January 3rd, over 18,000 U.S. flights have been canceled, over 12 percent of all flights scheduled during that time.
It’s not all weather. Hawaiian Airlines, far from any sort of winter, had to cancel multiple inter-island flights due to crew shortages. According to United Airlines, the spike on COVID-19 infections caused by the highly virulent omicron variant has left them short-staffed and scrambling to crew flights. Delta cited both omicron and the weather, and American Airlines said it was just the storms.
Over the weekend, however, frustrated passengers were told little, just that there were delays and rescheduling.
Even as flight numbers recover from the storms, airlines are still facing crew shortages. United, for instance, is offering pilots triple wages if they’ll pick up extra flights, and ordinarily tight-fisted Spirit Airlines has reached a deal with their flight attendants’ union to pay double through Tuesday.
With the CDC again making recommendations that people should be cautious about air travel, the delays will have consequences. The flight itself, with its highly filtered and very dry air, is not the highest risk part of travel for infectious disease – it’s the airport. Crowded, often humid, with many people clustered together in lines at security or gates, airports are a perfect vector for omicron transmission. Add in delays making the number of people at any gate at any time rise, and we’ll certainly see an infection surge in the coming days.
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