Air travel still clogged by hurricane Sandy, but some flights resume

With New York's airports closed and thousands of flights cancelled, it will take days for air travel to return to normal after hurricane Sandy. But precautions taken by airlines could ease the process.

Hurricane Sandy largely grounded air travel in the nation's busiest air corridor, and it will take days for travelers to get their plans back on track.

Flooding means it's unclear when New York's LaGuardia Airport will reopen. But as the storm moves inland, limited air travel has resumed in the Northeast.

On Tuesday, for example, Alaska Airlines’ morning nonstop from Seattle to Boston was back in action, after being cancelled Monday. While en route, Flight 12 was actually scheduled to land at Boston's Logan Airport a few minutes early.

But many thousands of travelers who were still searching for ways to, from, or through East Coast airports, confronted the following realities:

• Sandy has resulted in over 18,100 flight cancellations so far, including nearly 8,000 on Monday and more than 7,000 on Tuesday.

• The major New York City area airports remain closed with no estimated reopen time.

• Airports in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston were open but operating with limited flights.

• Passengers are reporting wait times of several hours at most airline call centers.

“Every airline is allowing fee-free changes (and refunds in some cases) for itineraries potentially impacted by the storm,” FlightAware said in a Tuesday afternoon status report, which contained the flight-cancellation totals. “The best way to make flight changes is on airline websites."”

Some passengers have been helped in rebooking by posting Twitter updates about their plight, with a mention of the airline involved. Even as airlines work to restore service and rebook passengers, the tally of Sandy-related flight cancellations could grow.

But when the airports do reopen, lessons that airlines learned the hard way from previous storm-induced disruptions to regular service should help the airlines restore service more smoothly and quickly, even if they’re dealing with a substantial backlog.

"It will probably take until the weekend for things to return to normal," Rob Maruster, chief operating officer of New York-based JetBlue Airways, told the Associated Press.

Taking a page from a new bad-weather playbook, airlines that had been tracking Sandy for days moved quickly to cancel flights in advance, keeping passengers from congregating in terminals (nothing good can come of that), aircraft scattered at other airports out of harms way, and flight crews and airport staff rested and fresh for the resumption of business.

"The last few major storms created such gridlock, and such bad will with their best customers,” airlines “just had to shift their behavior," Kate Hanni, who heads up the passenger advocacy group Flyers Rights, told the AP. "The flying public would rather have their flights pre-cancelled than be sleeping in Chicago on a cot."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Air travel still clogged by hurricane Sandy, but some flights resume
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/1030/Air-travel-still-clogged-by-hurricane-Sandy-but-some-flights-resume
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe