The departure boards were full of woe for holiday travelers as airlines struggled with de-icing planes, clearing gate areas of snow and staffing ticket counters. Many domestic flights were canceled or delayed on Tuesday and international service was limited.
“We have arrivals, we have departures, but we’re still looking at a lot of cancellations,” said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “It could take days to clear because you had two days of no flights.”
Because of lingering snow and ice, Newark Liberty International Airport and Kennedy International Airport each had only one runway open in the early afternoon and were operating with a reduced number of flights. In contrast, La Guardia Airport had no runway issues.
“We’re running a full schedule at La Guardia,” said Trebor Banstetter of Delta, and “hoping to return to a full schedule at J.F.K. by tomorrow morning, and at Newark by midday tomorrow.” The airline had 300 cancellations on Tuesday. Continental, which uses Newark International as a hub, canceled more than 480 departures systemwide on Tuesday, according to a company spokesman.
The rare extended shutdown of all three major area airports stranded many passengers, but with airports closed and flights canceled rather than delayed, they mostly avoided being stuck in terminals. Still, more than 1,400 people spent at least one night, the majority in Kennedy Airport, according to the Port Authority.
Terminal 8 at J.F.K. looked like an impromptu campsite on Tuesday morning. Some passengers were stretched out on green cots while others rested on their luggage. For some, black plastic containers — with the logo of American Airlines stenciled on the side — were the only alternative to the hard floor.
Steven Gomez, 19, of Garfield, N.J., had been at the airport since 4 p.m. Sunday for a flight to Chicago. “Now they’re telling me my flight is on the 30th,” he said.
Some passengers took to social media sites like Twitter to vent their frustrations while others posted updates to help those wading through the holiday travel morass.
The trouble for airlines lies in finding new flights for delayed passengers. Airlines were running at record levels of capacity even before Sunday’s storm blanketed the city with more than 20 inches of snow during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Through the first nine months of the year, domestic flights were fuller than at any similar period since the Department of Transportation began its tracking.
With airlines flying flights so full, finding space on new flights into and out of New York’s airports for nearly two day’s worth of passengers could take the better part of the next week.
“Flights are going out at a much slower pace than normal and there are crew availability issues as well,” said Allison Steinberg, a spokeswoman for JetBlue Airways. “Our goal is to resume as normal as possible by tomorrow. We’re doing all that we can.”
A limited number of planes took off from La Guardia and J.F.K. on Monday evening, though flights into and out of Newark Liberty did not resume until Tuesday morning.
Ground transportation to and from all three airports was improving as most major roads were cleared overnight, but bus service remained limited and many streets, especially outside Manhattan, were still impassable. Airport employees reported much slower commutes.
The AirTrain shuttle from Kennedy to the subway was out of service, though the Port Authority said it was working to replace the route with bus service by Tuesday afternoon.
New Jersey Transit officials said they would operate rail service on a holiday schedule on Tuesday. Amtrak resumed limited service along the northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, which includes a stop at Newark Liberty. Trains on the Long Island Rail Road, suspended for most of Monday, returned on Tuesday with limited service from Pennsylvania Station to Babylon, Huntington, Port Washington and Ronkonkoma. Metro-North service was operating on a weekend schedule or an otherwise limited basis.
But as Mr. Gomez discovered, getting to the airport, while still difficult, is only the first of many difficulties.
“It was just very uncomfortable to camp at an airport,” he said. Aside from having not been able to get a cot, he said he had eaten very little because the food in the terminal was expensive and he was on a budget.
American Airlines told him that his only option was to stay at the airport and try to fly standby on Tuesday or Wednesday. “I hope it works, because I want to get out of here,” he said.
Tolu Akinsanya found himself in a similarly protracted situation. A Nigerian citizen, Mr. Akinsanya had been trying since noon on Sunday to get to London to take care of visa-related paperwork at the American embassy there. When his flight was canceled, a Swiss Air bus that was supposed to take him to a hotel room got stuck in the snow.
The airline offered to reimburse fliers who wished to find accommodations on their own, but Mr. Akinsanya, a 26-year-old law school student at Hofstra, said he had no money to do so. The airline then ran out of cots and chairs after distributing them first to children and the elderly.
“What do they come up with?” he said. “Cardboard!”
But he turned them down. “I’m too proud,” he said with a smile.
Noah Rosenberg, Nate Silver and Nadia Taha contributed reporting.
No comments:
Post a Comment