Friday offers hope for weather-battered air travelers
Last update: 2:40 p.m. ET.
Finally, there is light at the end of the tunnel for weather-weary air travelers. But first, they must get through Friday, the last of a brutal 14-day stretch in which airlines have canceled 23,433 flights and delayed more than 62,355 during a seemingly endless series winter storms.
More than 785 flights were grounded nationwide and about 3,050 delayed as of 2:40 p.m. ET, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. Fortunately for travelers, calmer weather was in store for most of the county not only on Friday, but also into next week.
Thursday was by far the worst day of the recent brutal stretch, with airlines canceling a whopping 4,960 flights across the nation and delaying another 5,589. Combined, that meant nearly half of all Thursday flights in the United States were either canceled or delayed. There are about 23,000 scheduled flights in the U.S. on a typical winter weekday, according to FlightAware.
Thursday's miserable travel conditions were punctuated by a mishap at New York LaGuardia in which a Delta Air Lines MD-88 jet skidded of a runway and into an embankment on arrival from Atlanta around 11 a.m. ET. LaGuardia's schedule was already struggling in the poor weather, but the incident forced officials to halt all flights at the airport for about 4 hours. By the end of the day, 75% of Thursday's flights ended up being canceled.
Indeed, LaGuardia – and New York in general – remained the nation's top air travel trouble spot Friday morning, with about 150 cancellations there as of 2:40 p.m. ET, according to FlightAware. That represented more than 10% of all of Friday's schedule there. Lingering issues were likely as one of the airport's runways remained closed Friday morning because of Thursday's incident.
Elsewhere in New York, about 7% of the day's flights had already been canceled at the Newark Liberty and JFK airports, where between 5% and 10% of the day's flights had been grounded.
At Washington's Reagan National Airport, about 9% of the day's flights had been grounded. Rochester, N.Y., had about 10% of its schedule canceled while the figure at Raleigh-Durham was about 6%.