With a major winter storm barreling down towards Texas, the state’s wealthy residents appear to have come up with the same plan to weather the arctic blast… get out of Texas and fly somewhere warmer.
On Thursday evening, the approach roads to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) came to a standstill as a long line of gridlocked traffic tried to get to Terminal C.
Video footage captured by one motorist and shared by the Dallas Texas TV account on X revealed the extent of the long tailbacks that brought traffic to a standstill at the second busiest airport in the United States.
Meanwhile, DFW Airport also warned passengers of the traffic gridlock, encouraging visitors to use any other terminal to reach the airport, going through the TSA checkpoint and then using the Skylink train to reach Terminal C for American Airlines departures.
The true extent of just how bad this weekend’s winter storm will be is still open to debate, although the National Weather Service is warning of freezing rain and sleet spreading southwards into North Texas from Friday evening.
Cold conditions are expected throughout the weekend with the possibility of snow and sleet in North Texas by Sunday morning.
DFW said on Thursday that its preparations for the winter storm were well underway, with deicing trucks and snowplows on standby should the weather turn out to be as bad as forecasters are predicting.
American Airlines is proactively canceling flights ahead of the storm and repositioning aircraft to get its operation back up and running as fast as possible once the arctic blast has passed through.
Importantly, the airline says it is aligning pilot and flight attendant resources to where they are expected to be needed, as no one wants a repeat of the Christmas Holiday meltdown that Southwest Airlines suffered in 2022.
In that case, Southwest lost track of where its crew was, meaning that even when weather conditions improved, the airline wasn’t able to get its operation back up and running because it didn’t know where its pilots and flight attendants were.
A similar fiasco hit Delta Air Lines in the aftermath of the Cloudstrike outage in 2024, so all eyes will be on these two carriers to see if they have learned lessons from these debacles.
Class warfare aside. I’m not wealthy, but if I was I’m not so sure I would fly out of Terminal C at DFW. I’d be headed to my G700 at the FBO base at DFW or a nearby airport. I dont’ think this is an issue of wealthy people flying to Hawaii or whatever. There are also a lot of events going on right now in DFW. The Fort Worth Stock Show, NCAA cheerleading championships, etc.
How do you know they are wealthy?