Air travel is no holiday as covid and storms cancel flights

Airlines may have thought their pandemic troubles were behind them in the fall as a coronavirus wave subsided and travelers increasingly took to the skies. But a new virus surge and winter storms have left the carriers and their passengers in a holiday mess. Heading into the New Year’s weekend, when return flights will produce another crest in air travel, airlines have been canceling more than 1,000 flights a day to, from or within the United States. Carriers and their employees say the latest chapter of the pandemic, the Omicron variant, has cut deeply into the ability to staff flights, even though a vast majority of crew members are vaccinated. “I’ve never seen a meltdown like this in my life,” said Angelo Cucuzza, the director of organizing at the Transport Workers Union, which represents flight attendants at JetBlue. “They just can’t keep up with the amount of folks that are testing positive.” JetBlue has been one of the airlines hardest hit, canceling 17 percent of its flights on Thursday, according to the air travel data site FlightAware. The carrier said Wednesday that it would cut about 1,280 flights through mid-January, citing the rise in virus cases in the Northeast, where its operations and crews are concentrated. And then there was the weather, always a volatile element in holiday travel but particularly challenging in recent days — notably in the Pacific Northwest, where heavy snowfall and record low temperatures grounded planes last weekend. The next few days may be just as frustrating. Storms in Southern California and the Northwest could combine to dump snow on airline hubs in Denver and Chicago, with severe thunderstorms threatening Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, too, according to Dan DePodwin, director of forecast operations at AccuWeather. Alaska Airlines, whose main hub is Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, went so far as to suggest that people put off nonessential travel until the new year. <br/>