Holiday travelers looking to return home after Christmas are finding their journey to be a bit like the mom from Home Alone. The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is reportedly causing the cancellations of a huge number of flights, with over six-thousand flights having already been shut down in the United States the past few days.
Still, The New York Times is reporting that some of the cancellations are not related to the virus at all. While that seems very odd, here is the quote:
Some of this weekend’s delays had little to do with the pandemic. Alaska Airlines had only a few cancellations related to crew exposures to the coronavirus, according to a spokeswoman, Alexa Rudin. Yet it had canceled 170 flights those two days, according to FlightAware, including 21 percent of its Sunday flights, because of unusually cold and snowy weather in the Pacific Northwest, which affected its hub, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Meanwhile, independent journalist Tim Pool covers the situation where Omicron is clearly passing over the population at an incredible rate, but plane cancellations aren’t being reported due to disease:
All of this is very odd, and we don’t want to speculate here at That Park Place on the reasons behind these flight cancellations. What we do want to do is make sure that our readers are prepared for travel concerns should these continue to arise. If you’re planning to fly in the next week, maybe its time to come up with some backup plans? After all, this seems to be accelerating. CNN is reporting that as of 2:10 PM EST on Monday, already two-thousand more flights have been cancelled. We’re just barely into the afternoon!
Of the more than 2,500 canceled flights, 1,000 were within, into or out of the United States, according to FlightAware. More than 9,000 flights are delayed.Globally, airlines canceled more than 6,000 flights on Christmas Eve, Christmas and the day after Christmas. In the United States, more than 1,200 flights were canceled and more than 5,000 were delayed on Sunday alone as staff and crew call out sick.The cancellations come at the busiest time of year for air travel. The US Transportation Security Administration said it screened millions of people each day over the holiday weekend, peaking at 2.19 million travelers on Thursday, December 23. On Wednesday, more people passed through TSA checkpoints than on the same day in 2019.
According to that report, even if your flight isn’t cancelled, we’re talking about nine-thousand delays in the last few days. When you factor in that many delays into your travel plans, you can count on airports being crowded with frustrated persons. There’s not much less fun than being stuck in a terminal with a bunch of grumpy travelers in uncomfortable chairs.
As for me, I’m going to hold up on air travel for at least a few more weeks to make sure this all clears up.
What are your plans? Are you currently stuck at an airport waiting for a plane? Let us know your experiences in the comments below!
