Thousands of Flights Canceled Monday After Snowstorm

Delays and cancellations persisted a day after more than 11,000 flights were canceled. Airports in the Northeastern U.S. were hit the hardest.

Air travel was slowly beginning to recover on Monday, though thousands of flights across dozens of airports remained canceled and delayed after a winter storm brought heavy snow and ice to much of the Eastern United States over the weekend.

More than 5,100 flights in the United States were canceled and another 5,700 were delayed by midafternoon, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. Most major airlines were offering travel waivers and rebooking options to customers.

But flying was beginning to pick up from Washington to Boston as airports dug out of the snow and ice. While the storm has wreaked havoc for days, air travel may be able to bounce back soon. Because airlines had days to prepare, many of them canceled flights early and moved planes and workers to prepare to restart normal operations. The end of January is also among the slowest periods of the year for air travel, meaning carriers have more spare planes, staff and other resources available.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said on Monday that he expected flights would return to normal by midweek.

“We’re looking at Wednesday as our hope to get back to a normal schedule,” he said in an interview on CNBC. With snowfall having mostly subsided in the Northeast, “now it’s dig-out day,” he added.

The level of delays and cancellations on Monday was very high by typical standards, but represented a notable improvement from Sunday, which was the worst day for flight cancellations since the early days of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Mr. Duffy. Ice and frigid temperatures may slow flights in the days ahead, though airlines were making progress rebooking travelers.

United Airlines said that 72 percent of customers who had a trip canceled on Sunday already had new flights by Monday afternoon. JetBlue Airways, whose network was especially hard-hit on Monday, said that it was restarting some flights in New York and Boston and had added more than 35 new flights on Monday and Tuesday.

Airports in Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., saw the largest number of cancellations for departing flights over the weekend, but the disruption followed the weather. About half the departures scheduled for Monday out of Kennedy Airport, LaGuardia Airport, and Newark Liberty International Airport had been canceled by the afternoon.

A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the three New York airports, said that each would be capable of operating at normal capacity by Tuesday, though airlines may still delay or cancel flights because they don’t have enough planes or crews available.

Boston Logan International Airport was reporting the highest share of cancellations on Monday, with 60 percent of its scheduled departures, more than 320 flights, canceled according to FlightAware.

The airport received 19 inches of snow over the weekend, said Ben Crawley, an airport spokesman.

“The airlines are eager to restart their full schedules but need to bring their planes back from other states, and we don’t expect to be fully back to normal until sometime Tuesday,” he said.

A single cancellation can have cascading consequences. Some passengers may miss connecting flights and crews and planes may miss future scheduled trips. Airlines first try to protect long-distance international flights and flights connecting busy airport hubs because those trips are central to normal operations of their networks.

American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, was the most affected airline over the weekend and on Monday. American had canceled more than 4,000 flights since Friday, including more than 1 in 3 of its planned flights on Monday. In a statement, the airline said that five of its nine airport hubs had been affected by the storm.

“We’re very sorry to our customers for the disruption this weather event has caused and thank our team members — many of whom are working overtime and are continuing to safely brave the conditions as they take care of as many customers as possible,” it said.

Major airlines have invested in technology that can help determine which flights to cancel and how best to recover from disruptions. Software like the “Operational Recovery Cancellation Analyzer” at United Airlines or the “Hub Efficiency Analytics Tool” at American Airlines help professionals identify flights to cancel that would have the least impact on customers, crews and flight routes.

But when disruptions are as widespread as they have been over the past few days, the recovery can be difficult. Some customers can postpone missed trips to later in the year, but many need to get to their destinations as soon as possible.

To handle those demands, airlines may use larger planes on some routes to accommodate customers who were on canceled flights. They have also invested in making it easier to rebook customers from canceled flights, either automatically or with tools that let passengers choose the options that best suit them.

In 2024, about half of United customers on canceled flights were either rebooked automatically or chose alternative flights using the airline’s tools, a 28 percent increase from the year before, the company said last year. American employs a tool capable of reaccommodating 75 percent of customers from a canceled flight to a new one in as little as 12 minutes.

James Younge and his girlfriend spent the weekend on a cruise in the Bahamas, and found out their Southwest flight home, to Philadelphia, on Monday was canceled as the ship returned to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The soonest the airline could rebook them was Wednesday.

“It’s a huge hassle,” said Mr. Younge, 39. They paid $500 for two nights at a hotel near the airport while they searched for earlier flights.

The couple’s biggest concern was getting home to their two Bengal cats. Mr. Younge’s sister and a friend checked on the cats over the last few days, but were so far unable to reach them on Monday because of the snow.

Still, Mr. Younge hoped to make the most of the extra vacation days — he plans to visit relatives in South Florida and an aquarium.

Recovery from the storm requires a coordinated effort between airlines and airports.

Across the country, airports are treating roads, runways, taxiways, sidewalks, bridges and other airfield equipment to remove snow and ice, an effort that involves a vast amount of solid and liquid de-icer. At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, dealing with accumulated ice has been a challenge in part because it is still very cold, said Heath Montgomery, an airport spokesman. Departures at the airport are delayed by an average of nearly four hours, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

On Saturday, weather conditions at the airport had changed 23 times, delivering six hours of ice pellets, more than three hours of snow and two hours of freezing rain, according to American, which is based in Fort Worth.

Even at airports that are well practiced at responding to cold weather, de-icing can be complex, expensive and time-consuming. Jets often line up to be doused in fluid to remove and prevent ice. It is essential to safety. Even small amounts of ice can affect a plane’s aerodynamics. Chicago O’Hare International Airport is home to American Airlines’ biggest de-icing operation, where it treats planes 6,000 to 10,000 times every winter, using hundreds of thousands of gallons of de-icing fluid.

But in many places, conditions were so bad that de-icing was effectively useless, with ice accumulating so fast that the treatment would become ineffective nearly as quickly as it was applied, American said.

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