Philly air travelers continue to grapple with flight delays, cancellations

Thousands of Philadelphia holiday season air travelers continued to experience delays and cancellations Monday as airports and airlines grappled with the effect of a major storm that pummeled much of the country, leaving scores dead in its wake.

As of 7 p.m. Monday, 43 flights scheduled to fly in or out of Philadelphia International Airport were canceled and 184 were delayed. Nationwide, 3.632 flights were canceled by the same time and 5,953 were delayed, according to the tracking site FlightAware.

On Sunday, Philly’s largest airport had 39 canceled flights and 125 flight delays, inbound or outbound. Airports across the nation had 7,868 delayed flights and 3,182 canceled flights, with some high-traffic airports such as Denver International, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, and Chicago O’Hare International experiencing hundreds of flight interruptions.

With Christmas and Hanukkah overlapping this year, many people trying to visit family and friends and still others with scheduled vacations found their plans upended or at least greatly curtailed by what Philadelphia International Airport’s spokesperson called the “ripple effect” of the epic storm.

Since the end of last week, the storm, which was moving from the western part of the country toward the east, has been causing flight delays and cancellations in major airports such as Denver and Chicago, spokesperson Heather Redfern said.

“That’s flights that can’t get to other airports that might be coming to Philadelphia or coming to Philadelphia that would turn around and go back out again,” Redfern said. “So we can’t get that equipment and crews to begin with and a few days down the line, we’re still trying to also get the people where they want to be. So it’s a ripple effect, especially if it’s a major airport.”

As of Monday afternoon, Redfern said it was too early to say when normalcy would return to flight operations.

The extreme weather conditions of recent days have led to tragedy around the country, from six motorists killed in crashes in Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky, to a woman who fell through the ice in a Wisconsin river. About 60% of the U.S. population has faced some form of winter weather advisory as temperatures plunged dramatically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountain to the Appalachians.

Especially hard hit was the Buffalo area. Western New York state’s pre-Christmas blizzard claimed at least 28 lives with more expected as emergency crews continued to struggle to reach residents stuck inside homes and stranded in cars. The storm also knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes and resulted in the closure of Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The airport is projected to reopen Tuesday.

This article contains information from the Associated Press.