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A winter storm that hit the mid-Atlantic combined with the pandemic has caused flights around the world to be canceled or delayed.
More than 2,600 flights to the United States and more than 4,100 flights worldwide were canceled as of noon Monday (January 3), according to the flight tracking service, FlightAware.
Another 8,500 flights were delayed, including 3,100 in the US. Travelers can hope for a predicted improvement in the weather.
The airlines canceled less than 300 U.S. flights scheduled for Tuesday.
First, however, they had to face a winter storm that was expected to bring up to 25 inches of snow to the District of Columbia, North Virginia and Central Maryland by Monday afternoon.
The cancellations and delays just added to the frustration felt over the weekend by holiday travelers trying to get home.
“It was absolute chaos,” said Natasha Enos, who spent a Saturday night and Sunday sleepless day at Denver International Airport during what was supposed to be a short stop on a domestic trip from Washington to San Francisco. .
Enos, who had booked the flight on Frontier Airlines, did not learn that her connecting flight to California had been canceled until she had already landed in Denver. She rushed to find alternative flights and sailed through a baggage claim area that had been drowned with other passengers stranded and confused at the height of the new wave of COVID-19 infections.
With the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, the average for new COVID-19 daily cases in the US has tripled over the past two weeks and reached 400,000 on Sunday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
The number of flights disrupted in the US was in the hundreds a day, a week before Christmas and then rose to over 1,000 a day after airlines blamed the crew shortages caused by the virus.
For several days, airlines and their passengers lucked out ëith mostly favorable ëeather, but a ëinter storm that hit the Midëest on Saturday caused cancellations to spike again to neë highs.
Over the weekend, some 5,400 flights to the U.S. were canceled – nearly 12 percent of all scheduled flights – and more than 9,000 worldwide, according to FlightAware.
Many of the cancellations are made a few hours or even a day in advance. Airlines believe they have a better chance of keeping lighter schedules on track when there are outages such as snow or storms.
Southwest Airlines had canceled about 575 flights, or 15 of those scheduled for Monday, by noon.
Airlines are paying temporary bonuses to encourage pilots and flight attendants to pick up flights missed by colleagues with COVID-19. United Airlines will pay pilots three times their usual salary for taking open flights during most of January.
Spirit Airlines reached an agreement with the unions to pay the flight attendants double by Tuesday.
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