NY.– Maddie Schotl and Logan Hawley had packed their things in the car, packed their dog Frankie for the trip, and were heading out to Prairie Village, Kansas, when they decided to check their flight status one last time Thursday morning.
Their flight to Utah, where they were to join Mrs. Schotl’s family to go skiing, had been cancelled.
“So we sat in the driveway, had a little moment, called the family, and then said, ‘Let’s put the dog back in the house and have breakfast,’” Hawley said.
Theirs was just one tale of travelers encountering roadblocks on a day when a gust of cold swept across much of the United States, bringing rain, snow, blistering winds and freezing temperatures that created dangerous conditions.
By Thursday afternoon, approximately 10,000 flights across the country, as well as international flights to or from the United States, had been delayed or canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking platform. The Federal Aviation Administration handles about 45,000 flights on an average day.
On Wednesday, more than 8,300 flights were delayed and 595 cancelled, meaning disruptions affected more than 20 percent of air travel before the storm’s peak.
From January 2022 to September 2022, the period for which the most recent official data is available, more than 20 percent of flights were delayed and 2.76 percent were cancelled, according to the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Transportation.
Even with their flight rescheduled for Friday, Schotl, 31, and Hawley, 34, were feeling positive as they reflected on their new plan for the day: catch a movie in their basement.
