The post-Christmas travel rush has not got off to a good start, with JetBlue and Delta Air Lines collectively canceling nearly 500 flights on December 26, and delays are still mounting on hundreds of other flights.
According to the flight tracking website Flight Aware, JetBlue has already been forced to slash its planned schedule by 22% on Friday, with 218 flights canceled and a further 135 flights currently delayed.
Delta’s mainline operation is currently faring slightly better, with 5% or 163 flights currently scrapped and 247 flights currently experiencing delays. Delta’s regional operator, Endeavor, has, however, also canceled 10% of its planned schedule.
In comparison, American Airlines and United Airlines have only been forced to collectively cancel a few dozen flights, although delays are affecting both carriers.
The culprit? Severe winter weather in the northeast that could dump as much as 8 inches of snow in New York City by Saturday morning is upending flying schedules, and cancellations are already rolling into tomorrow.
That could present a massive headache for travelers, given that the TSA has warned that December 27 is expected to be one of the busiest travel days of the season, followed by Sunday, when as many as 2.86 million Americans are expected to try and catch flights.
Severe weather in the northeast could have ripple effects across the United States with planes and crews out of position, leading to cascading cancellations and delays.
The hope is that the disruption already being reported is a proactive step that will protect airline operations for everyone else planning to travel. Unfortunately, that’s not how these things always pan out.
All eyes will be on Delta to see whether this crew tracking software is able to keep up with the disruption, or whether bad weather in one part of the US will lead to a snowball effect that causes more and more cancellations.
During last year’s Crowdstrike software fiasco, it wasn’t so much the initial outage that caused Delta’s embarrassing meltdown but rather the fact that the airline lost track of where its pilots and flight attendants were.
It was this exact reason that Southwest Airlines suffered a disastrous holiday meltdown over Christmas 2022, which left an estimated two million passengers stranded.
In the last few years, Southwest has invested millions of dollars to improve its crew tracking software, and thankfully, the airline has yet to see a repeat of that level of disruption since.
