Airlines Preemptively Canceling Flights in New York Area

Under threat of snow, airlines are preemptively canceling flights at the three New York-area airports for both today and tomorrow.

To me, this looks like a test of the assertion that airlines would cancel a larger than normal number of flights with bad weather merely forecast, rather than raging, to underscore their opposition to the Transportation Department rule that imposes severe fines on carriers for stranding passengers on tarmacs for over three hours. The rule has effectively ended so-called tarmac strandings for domestic carriers (international carriers are not covered by the rule, and have been responsible for several egregiously lengthy strandings in recent snowstorms).

On the other hand, airlines do routinely cancel some flights preparation for seriously bad weather so that x-number of airplanes and crews are not frozen in place if bad weather does hit.

As of 9 a.m. EST today at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 216 flights have been canceled -- and 145 flights scheduled for tomorrow have also been scrubbed. At Kennedy, it's 101 today and 97 tomorrow. La Guardia: 172 today and 114 tomorrow.

Data as usual from FlightStats.com

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Nearly All Flights in Atlanta Canceled; Cancellations Also Mounting for Tuesday As Big Storm Heads Toward New York

[UPDATED]
Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, the busiest airport in the country in terms of flights handled, is virtually shut today as ice and snow hit the city. As of 6 p.m. EST, 2,211 of today's 2,570 flights have been canceled.

And tomorrow is also grim: Already, about 900 departures and arrivals have been canceled at Atlanta.

Cancellations are also hitting other airports. At Charlotte, 527 flights had been scrubbed by late afternoon. (Data from FlightStats.com)

The storm is expected to hit the New York area starting early Tuesday night, with snow accumulations of 10 or more inches possible. Right now, the New York airports are operating with delays, partly as a result of the Atlanta mess, but only the hilariously named Newark Liberty International airport is reporting cancellations, in this case about 70.

AirTran canceled all of its Atlanta flights. The airlines canceling the most flights in Atlanta are Delta, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, which operates Delta Connection flights, and AirTran, which Southwest is in the process of acquiring.

Because of the large number of regional connecting flights it handles as a hub in the Southeast, Atlanta is the busiest airport in the country. (In fact, it's the busiest airport in the world in terms of the number of flights it handles).

In Atlanta, even MARTA has shut down, canceling all bus service today and maybe tomorrow too.

Meanwhile, the Loews hotel chain has said that it is offering a special rate of $139 a night at its new Loews Atlanta hotel through Wednesday. Passengers stranded in Atlanta might want to take note.

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Atlanta Cancellations As of 9 A.M: 2,550

There have been 2,550 flights canceled in Atlanta as of 9 a.m.
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[Newspapers used to pad out columns of type inside the paper that were a few lines short with trivial fillers of information. One I remember in particular from the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin when I worked there in the late 70s had the headline: No Blood in Ants over a story that consisted entirely of this sentence: Ants have no blood.
]
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Heads-Up: Cancellations Mount in Atlanta

Snowy weather equals massive flight cancellations these days, and Atlanta is racking them up: 350 today and, hang on, 1,650 flights canceled already for tomorrow.

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Democratic Congresswoman Shot in Tucson

Gabrielle Giffords, the liberal Democratic congresswoman from Tucson, has just been shot in Tucson. Details developing.

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Row 44 WiFi in Another Advance for Service on International Flights

The aggressively expanding inflight WiFi provider Row 44 said today that it received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to offer its satellite-based broadband service in flights over the Atlantic.

The FCC issued Row 44 a license for the T11N North Atlantic Oceanic Coverage satellite. This makes Row 44 the only provider allowed to operate and charge for inflight broadband connectivity on transatlantic flights.

In the U.S., Aircell's Gogo system -- which is based on land antennas and can't operate over oceans -- is the leading inflight Internet provider, with service operating on more than 1,044 mainline domestic planes of seven U.S. various airlines, Delta being the leading one, and on Air Canada.

Row 44 is now installing its system on Southwest's entire fleet of 737s, and has been in trials with other airlines.

The next expansion is international, obviously, though there is already robust competition from foreign companies on airplanes operating in Europe and elsewhere.

"This license creates complete seamlessness for Row 44’s broadband across the Atlantic," said Howard Lefkowitz, Row 44’s chief commercial officer. "Row 44 is now the only company in the world whose airline customers can charge for in-flight broadband on, say, a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York."

On Wednesday, Row 44, had said it received a so-called Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) from the European Aviation Safety Agency to install its system on commercial aircraft in Europe. The certificate cleared a big hurdle for the company in its plans to sell its service to European airlines.

Row 44 says it is authorized for operation in over 100 countries, on four continents. The company’s current network coverage includes service over the US, Mexico and Canada, with transatlantic coverage linking North America and Europe expected this year.

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A Hint of Snow, and Hundreds of Flights Canceled in New York

Hey, it's winter. It snows sometimes in New York, so let's not get all hysterical about it, airlines and government and, of course, media.

Anyway, it was snowing in New York -- the forecast was for maybe four inches, tops. [UPDATE -- Mid-afternoon, only a trace of snow had been seen in the Big Apple, and by the end of the day the total accumulation was less than 2 inches!]

Emergency! Emergency! As of mid-morning today, before a snowflake fell, airlines had preemptively canceled more than 400 flights at the three New York airports, with most of the cancellations (110 departures and 113 arrivals) at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport. (The numbers come from FlightStats.com)

This will probably present a better opportunity than the Christmas blizzard to assess to what degree airlines are willy-nilly and preemptively canceling flights to head off the slightest possibility of being slapped with those new fines for excessive tarmac passenger tarmac strandings that the Transportation Department set last spring.

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Southwest Revamps Rapid Rewards: No Blackout Dates for Seat Awards; Points Awarded for All Spending; New Elite Level

Southwest Airlines is making big changes to its Rapid Rewards frequent-flier program in a bold move to further differentiate its product brand and to lure more business travelers away from other major airlines.

The new Web site with details of the program has just gone up (at 5.30 a.m. Eastern) at www.newrapidrewards.com. Also, the head of the program, Ryan Green, has a blog post on the announcement at www.blogsouthwest.com.

Starting March 1, under a new system in which points are assigned based on how much is spent, members will be able to redeem points for every seat, every day, on every flight, with no blackout dates or seat restrictions. Also, points won’t expire over a 24-month time period in which there has been any activity in the account.

Points will be awarded based on the fare. The same is true for redeeming points.

Southwest is also adding a new elite-status level to its program -- A-List Preferred. And all members will be able to purchase points, in blocks of 1,000.

Southwest, which kept the announcement very hush-hush until 5:30 a.m. Eastern time today, said that members with existing credits and awards in the current program will retain their value until they are used or expire. Members’ accounts will automatically be transferred to the new program on March 1. There is no need to re-enroll.


NEW PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

--No blackout dates.

--Every Southwest Airlines seat is a reward seat (no seat restrictions or capacity controls).

--Points don’t expire as long as members earn by flying or using a partner once every 24 months.

--Points are based on the purchased fare and fare product.

When the new program launches in March, members who have a Rapid Rewards credit card will also be able to redeem points for flights to more than 800 international destinations, plus hotels around the world.

This aspect of the program, however, is a lot less fluid, it seems to me. Southwest isn't actually partnering with international airlines. Instead, award tickets on international flights will be purchased by Southwest, essentially through a travel agency, at going rates, with points charged based on available fare.

Benefits for A-List Preferred, the new level of elite status open to A-List and Companion Pass members, include double points on fares purchased.

Southwest expects the program to generate "hundreds of millions in incremental revenue annually for Southwest, net of any associated program costs, to be fully realized over the next several years." Southwest said in an embargoed Webinar yesterday that it spent $100 million developing the new program.

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Today's Mean Chuckle: City Tourism Promo Parodies

[Photo: Duckboating in Boston, a.k.a. "Hub of the Universe"]

From the very interesting news and features Web site Good, some "hastily-made videos" in the growing genre of the "Cleveland" classic. New ones target the always self-referential Boston, St. Paul, Detroit, North Korea and elsewhere.

Interesting thing is they all actually look and sound like the real stuff churned out by dreadful PR agencies in various cities that don't actually get the joke.

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Row 44 Moves Closer to WiFi Installations on Planes in Europe

Row 44, the inflight WiFi company that's currently installing its system on Southwest Airlines' entire fleet, is moving closer to European operations.

Row 44, based in California, says it has received a so-called Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to install its satellite-based system on commercial aircraft in Europe.

“EASA approval marks another major milestone for Row 44, clearing the final hurdle for us to offer our in-flight broadband connectivity platform on another continent,” said Row 44 chief commercial officer Howard Lefkowitz. "Planes equipped with it will soon be flying all across Europe with a full menu of in-flight broadband services – internet, video, e-commerce, games and more. We will be pioneering a whole new flying experience for passengers throughout Europe," said Lefkowitz, who formerly was the president of Vegas.com, an big online concierge service in Las Vegas.

Row 44’s EASA STC covers Boeing 737-700, 800 and 900 series airframes.

Competitor Aircell, whose Gogo system has been favored by other U.S. airlines, depends on land-based antennas. Gogo is currently operating on 1,044 mainline airplanes flown by Delta, United, US Airways, Virgin America, American, Alaska, Air Canada and AirTran. While the Gogo system is available only on some aircraft of most of the airlines that have signed on, the entire Delta mainline fleet is equipped. And Delta said in November that it plans to expand Gogo to its fleet of 223 larger regional jets, the ones with two-class cabins. When that expansion is completed later this year, 80 percent of Delta's domestic fleet will have Gogo service.

Meanwhile, United Airlines is also rumored to be testing Row 44 on at least one of its 757s, concurrent with trial runs of the Gogo system on other planes in its fleet.

Last September, JetBlue and another satellite WiFi system provider, ViaSat, announced a preliminary agreement for ViaSat to install its system on JetBlue's fleet of about 160 planes by next year.
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Sabre vs. American Airlines As Fare-Channel Battle Intensifies

The fare-distribution brawl got hotter today as the global distribution system Sabre busted down American Airlines on its very important fare-distribution network.

Here's Bloomberg on the news.

American started the fight last month when, in an attempt to drive more bookings to its own Web site, it pulled fares from Orbitz.com. Then on New Year's Day, Expedia.com threw American off its site.

With Sabre's move, we'll see whether American blinks first in this fight. Sabre, not coincidentally, owns Travelocity.com, the third of the major online consumer booking sites.

American's move against outside distribution channels is seen as audacious by many in the travel-management business.

"American acts as if it's the country's biggest airline, when it's really number four and falling," said Kevin P. Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition.

He added, "American is making a reckless rodeo bet that it can rope its best customers like calves and then push and pull and kick them toward aa.com and Direct Connect. Online consumers may not even know American's flights are missing. The ones who will gain the most here are American's competitors United, Southwest and others."

Obviously, eliminating fare information from third-party sites makes it far more (corrected) difficult for customers to easily comparison-shop on fares. On the other hand, to the extent that it increases traffic on AA.com, American seems to think that it stands to gain somewhat.

The airline system, rapidly constricting and consolidating, is ripe for review under antitrust concerns, some people think. But with this new Congress, that doesn't seem to be much in the cards.

Sabre and American go way back, of course.

Meanwhile, travel groups are warning that the battle over the distribution systems could lead to bad news for business travelers.


"Today’s news from Sabre represents a serious escalation of the growing conflict around airline-mandated 'direct connects'," said Mike McCormick, executive director of the National Business Travel Association, referring to bookings made directly on an airline Web site. "Business travel buyers will ultimately foot the bill for marketplace fragmentation caused by airline initiatives that push the travel distribution marketplace in the wrong direction – away from transparency and competitiveness and toward confusion and higher costs.”

The business travel trade group said that bypassing outside distribution systems will result in a significant increase in travel costs, especially as travel management companies and agencies will need to build new systems to capture these so-called direct-connect fares on behalf of their business travel clients.

Also, the NBTA said, "Businesses that rely on clear and transparent fare information to negotiate for and maintain airline discount programs will find it far more difficult to track volume and enforce travel policies in a fragmented market."

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More than 29,000 Flights Were Canceled in December

Airlines canceled 29,391 flights in December (3.54 percent of total flights scheduled), up sharply from 21,954 canceled flights (2.7 percent of total) in December 2009, according to Flightstats.com

Flightstats didn't break down cancellations by date in December, but the overall number, combined with other factors such as month-to-month weather comparisons, fits with data showing that about 10,000 flights were canceled at domestic airports during the five days starting on Christmas, when East Coast airports, especially those in the New York area, were hammered by a blizzard. The effects of the snowstorm, including those reflecting impossible airport conditions and those reflecting preemptive cancellations made by airlines to head off potential fines for tarmac strandings, rippled through the whole air-travel system.

On-time arrivals were at just 67.9 percent, meaning that almost a third of flights that fly arrived late -- and 11.43 percent of those arrived more than 44 minutes late, Flightstats said.

Of the top 10 North American airlines, JetBlue had by far the worst record on cancellations. In December, JetBlue scrubbed 8.16 percent of its scheduled flights.

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Happy New Year! Fly Better in 2011

[Photo: Continental Airlines Business/First class service]

Here's what we all need to aspire to in 2011: Comfortable air travel!
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Best Irony of the Year (So Far): Brazil Refuses to Extradite Terrorist Murderer to Italy

On his last day in office, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known here on previous occasions as Lucky Lula, said he would not extradite to Italy a terrorist murderer named Cesare Battisti, who was convicted in absentia of murdering four people in Italy in the 1970s. Here's a news clip from the Washington Post.

Italy, furious at Lula's action, recalled its ambassador to Brazil in protest.

Battisti has been a fugitive since 1981 when he escaped from an Italian jail. He turned up in Brazil in 2004. Barristi, who has requested political asylum in Brazil, was a member of the terrorist Armed Proletarians for Communism in Italy.

In Brazil there once was something of a tradition of people harboring international criminal fugitives, including the genocidal Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals fled to South America starting in 1945, not just to Brazil but to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia and elsewhere. Brazil has tried to live down the reputation, with some success now that almost all of the Nazi fugitives are presumed dead.

I note this here by way of irony. For four years, some Brazilian authorities and some people in Brazil have been demanding the extradition to Brazil of two American aviators, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, who were pilots of an American business jet that was involved in a horrific mid-air collision at 37,000 feet over the central Amazon on Sept. 29, 2006. The seven people on the American plane survived (I was one of them), while the 154 on the Brazilian airliner that collided with it died in a horrible crash into the jungle.

The crash was accompanied by an atmosphere of xenophobia and hysterical anti-Americanism in Brazil, which coincided with a presidential election in which Lula managed to eek out a second term. (Hence the "Lucky".) The Brazilian authorities rushed to scapegoat the American pilots for the accident, which is where I got involved in a protracted long-distance tangle with Brazil.

In its detailed report on the accident, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (N.T.S.B.) concluded that (as I had argued) egregious systemic and operational errors by the military-run Brazilan air traffic control system were the probable cause of the disaster.

The N.T.S.B. (which participated in the investigation because a U.S.-owned plane was involved) concluded this (italics mine): "The evidence collected during this investigation strongly supports the conclusion that this accident was caused by N600XL [the U.S. business jet] and GLO1907 [the Brazilian 737 airliner] following ATC [air traffic control] clearances which directed them to operate in opposite directions on the same airway at the same altitude resulting in a midair collision.

"The loss of effective air traffic control was not the result of a single error, but of a combination of numerous individual and institutional ATC factors, which reflected systemic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts."

However, that cut no ice with Brazilian prosecutors determined to blame the Americans. The two American pilots remain on criminal trial, in absentia, on those trumped-up charges in Brazil. Most Brazilians now realize that official butt-covering and media-fanned hysteria created great errors in the Brazilian reaction to the disaster -- not least of which was the unwise move to rush to criminalize an aviation accident.

The charges against the two Americans carry prison sentences, but under existing U.S.-Brazilian treaties and practices, they do not rise to the level requiring extradition to Brazil. However, some Brazilian officials and prosecutors have demanded that the Americans be extradited.

As I said, just noting the irony.

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Airlines in Defensive Crouch Over Blizzard Flight Chaos

Airlines assumed their familiar defensive crouch over massive flight cancellations and excessive delays that still are buckling airports in New York.

Though part of the blame was aimed accurately at the severity of the blizzard and its high winds, not to mention the incompetence and outright laziness of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which runs the airports), the airlines are now also in the public-opinion cross-hairs.

The reasons:

1. Failure to ensure even a modicum of customer service and responsiveness, as over 1 million passengers got stranded by cancellations, and even more by delays. There was an obvious initiative to preemptively cancel flights, even before the weather conditions deteriorated to the point where flying was impossible. Customers are livid about not being able to get through to airlines as the chaos built.

2. As airlines shank capacity and parked planes to shave operating costs in the last 18 months, and as airline mergers further constricted the system, there is no slack to handle even minor disruptions. Especially in a peak holiday travel season, all the planes were already full, so there was no way (especially because backup equipment and crews are pretty much a thing of the past) to handle the extra demand from passengers who were bumped off those 8,000-plus canceled flights.

Flights continue to be canceled today at the New York airports, though in far fewer numbers than recent days. Excessive delays (45 minutes and up) are also occurring. At the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 121 flights have been scrubbed as of mid-morning. At Kennedy, the number is 142. At La Guardia, it's 51.

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Nearly 1,500 Flights Canceled Today in New York, As Some Airlines Warn Passengers That Conditions in the Big Apple Still Blow

[UPDATED, 7 p.m. EST]
One might assume that long after the snowstorm has ended, the airlines at least would no longer be canceling flights in large numbers at the New York airports.

Ah, but one would assume wrongly.

This "one" -- that is, me, -- I assumed that all is vastly improved in New York, now that the frozen debris (which is how I now regard snow: debris) has all accumulated and is, presumably, under control. This is easy for me to assume, from my perch across the country in the sunny southern Arizona desert.

But no: Almost 1,500 flights were canceled today in New York, which remains pretty snowbound if not snowy. The frigid gusts of winds still blow, I am informed by my pal Joe Brancatelli in New York. "This was a classic blizzard, man, and it doesn't go away in a day and a half," he says. Public fury is rising in New York as many streets remain impassable, and reports come in about failures of city services like 911 systems. New York's sarcastic billionaire mayor isn't, evidently, helping matters much.

Major flight cancellations continue (along with severe delays). Across the river from Manhattan, at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, so far today there were 718 departures and arrivals canceled as of 7 p.m. EST. At Kennedy, the number was 577 canceled flights for today. At La Guardia, it's 202. Also, they're even already canceling some flights for tomorrow at Newark, Kennedy and La Guardia. [Departures and arrivals count equally in these data because no flight that leaves any of the New York airports arrives at another New York airport]

As usual, the flight-operations data are from the absolutely invaluable FlightStats.com

The Web site of Continental Airlines right now sounds like this ain't no fooling around: The hilarious named Newark Liberty International Airport has "limited operations," the Continental notice said at 7 p.m. Of flights that were even departing, the average delay at 7 p.m. was 4 hours and 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, some dopes in the media are credulously reporting airline assurances that passengers stranded by the cancellations that started Saturday will be easily accommodated within days. Trust me, this is not so. There are x-number of seats and airplanes available, and especially in a holiday travel period, these were almost all already booked before the blizzard hit. Then a total of more than 8,000 flights got canceled nationwide, from Saturday through today.

Maybe grandma could fit 20 pounds of stuffing into a 15-pound turkey, but the physics doesn't work out that way in air travel.

But here is a good summary today of the airline capacity-and-demand equation from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog on NYTimes.com.

Meanwhile, do not -- repeat not -- use the totally worthless F.A.A. Web site link for flight delays and cancellations. It's utterly unreliable, although some of the national media (yeah, I'm talking to you, CNN) still bafflingly refer to it.

Incidentally, from this perch in the sunny Arizona desert, you know what I do not miss even a tiny little bit? Waking up early in the morning after a storm and hearing that horrifying scraape, scraape noise from some invincibly perky neighbor's snow-shovel.

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Timing! Airlines Impose Across-the-Board Fare Hike

OK, now that the air-travel system looks like the Fall of Saigon, what do the airlines do? Yes, they impose an across-the-board baseline fare increase of $20 round-trip!

Timing!

This just in from the folks who run the invaluable Web site Farecompare.com, where Rick Seaney meticulously follows airline fare-change activity:

"In the midst of one of the worst travel disruptions of the year that saw thousands of passengers stranded at airports along the Eastern seaboard due to blizzard conditions, airfare prices are on the rise.

... United Airlines and Continental Airlines added a new $10 one-way "peak travel day" surcharge for the majority of their domestic routes ($20 roundtrip). These surcharges have been added to all future travel dates.

A couple of hours later, American Airlines launched a $20 roundtrip airfare hike for the bulk of its domestic route system, a hike that was soon matched by Delta Air Lines.

It's worth noting that these increases come on a day in which oil prices soared to a 26-month high, which impacts the airlines' jet fuel costs."

So far, says Farecompare's Graeme Wallace, filling in for the vacationing Seaney, Southwest has resisted joining-in in the fare hike.

With flight cancellations now exceeding 6,000 since Saturday, with New York airports barely struggling back to life as stranded passengers sleep on the floors, some geniuses at the airlines are obviously thinking: Hey, how many great chances like this do we get to totally alienate the public?

And oh, by the way, the airlines always say they are not acting in collusion on fixing prices when these fare increases get adopted all at the same time by supposedly competing carriers. No way! That would be, like, wrong -- right?

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Flight Cancellations Mount, Big Mess Ahead

[Battlefield, Gone With the Wind. "Tomorrow is another day"?]

How many flights were canceled over the weekend and today?

The media are all over the board on this one, but there's a very easy place to do the math: FlightStats.com, which is always right on top of these things.

According to FlightStats data on individual airports, there were more than 2,500 departures canceled today at the New York airports, plus Philly, Boston, Atlanta, BWI, Reagan, Dulles, O'Hare and Detroit. I didn't do the math for other airports, but it's safe to say that hundreds of additional departure cancellations were logged. Let's call it an even 3,000 departures that were canceled.

I'm not including figures for arrival cancellations, because some of the departure cancellations at any given airport also can turn up as arrival cancellations at another. Some, but not even close to most. But anyway, in all yesterday, there were more than 2,200 arrivals canceled at those airports.

On Sunday, there were just over 1,900 departures scrubbed at the same airports, with almost the same number of canceled departures. And on Saturday, Atlanta had more than 1,000 departure and arrival cancellations.

Rough guess is well over 5,000 flights that were scheduled from Saturday to Monday did not leave. Nearly each one was booked at or close to capacity, as are most of the existing flights on the schedule for this week and into the busy travel weekend.

It all adds up to one big fat serious disruption for air travel in the coming week, because there is no slack in the system to accommodate passengers who got canceled out.

Today some airports, with stranded passengers and crews camped out in despair, look like the battlefield-aftermath scene in "Gone With the Wind."

Tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hare, I mean O'Hara, famously vowed, is another day. But frankly, Scarlett, it will just be another damn mess.

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New York Airports Closed, Will Not Resume Flights Till Tonight

Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia airports are closed, and it isn't yet clear when flights will resume into and out of New York City and Newark. Airlines are guessing around 4 p.m. -- but that's a guess.

We haven't even begun to see the tales of woe that will be coming out of the air-travel system from the disruptions of the weekend, today and (undoubtedly) tomorrow. With flight cancellations exceeding 5,000 since Saturday, in a domestic system that has no slack built into schedules, it will take literally the rest of this year, at least, for air travel to get sorted out.

There were, for example, about 1,600 departures scheduled for today at Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia. (Plus more than 1,400 arrivals).

Most of those will be scrubbed from schedules, and displaced would-be passengers will have to scramble to find seats on other flights later in the week. This will occur as the final wave of 2010 holiday travel builds.

Meanwhile, I personally will lead a brigade of citizens with pitchforks to tar and feather the next reporter, photographer or editor who even thinks of commissioning a lighthearted ode, whether in words or pictures, by whatever media known or unknown, to a winter's day's snow.

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Big Air-Travel Mess Today, and a Bigger One Tomorrow; JFK and Newark Shut As Blizzard Causes Cancellations and Delays

Flight cancellations piled up as a blizzard moved along the eastern seaboard and into New York City this afternoon and tonight. Kennedy and Newark airports shut shortly after 8 p.m. EST tonight, with plans to reopen early tomorrow.

As expected, airlines canceled large numbers of flights at East Coast airports today, one day after more than 1,000 flights were canceled at Atlanta, merely on the possibility of a snowstorm.

As of 6 p.m. EST, nearly 3,000 arrivals and departures had been canceled at airports in the New York City and Washington areas, and in Philadelphia and Boston.

And airlines have begun preemptively canceling flights for Monday. At the three New York airports alone, nearly 700 departures and arrivals scheduled for tomorrow had already been scrubbed by 9 p.m. tonight.

On flights that remained scheduled today, some delays of well over three hours were being reported at airports.

Meanwhile, severe delays rippled through the air-traffic system far away from the storm, from Miami, where delays continued into the night, and Los Angeles, where things finally eased up early in the evening.

Overall, air travel today was, in short, a huge mess -- and it will be a huge mess (and possibly a worse one) tomorrow.

If you are flying, it is very important to check before leaving for the airport to ensure that your flight is even still on the board, let alone on time. Most affected airlines have put weather-related policies into effect, meaning that, assuming you're not already stuck in the mess, you can opt out -- cancel your plans and choose another travel date, within their guidelines, without paying the dread change-penalty fee.

Hey, it's the least airlines can do, considering that they've been whacking away at their operations, and obviously canceling many flights preemptively, for fear of having airplanes stuck on tarmacs and triggering big federal fines that took effect in April to discourage tarmac strandings.

From FlightStats.com, here as of 6 p.m. EST today are the major cancellations (of course, some will count twice, since a canceled departure at one airport can sometimes also be a canceled arrival at another on this list):

Reagan National -- Canceled: 148 departures, 132 arrivals -- of 759 total arrivals/departures scheduled.

Baltimore-Washington -- 146 departures and 161 arrivals (total 687 flights scheduled)

Dulles --69 departures, 62 arrivals (849 total)

Philadelphia -- 304 departures; 241 arrivals (of 1,265 flights scheduled)

Newark -- 292 departures, 349 arrivals (of 1,002 total)

JFK -- 282 departures, 296 arrivals (of 1,193 total)

La Guardia -- 256 departures, 283 arrivals (of 869 total)

Boston: 148 arrivals, 196 departures (857 total).

Meanwhile, these airports were reporting significant delays Sunday night: Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Detroit. Also, excessive delays are being reported at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa -- obviously as a result of the commotion rippling through the system from delays and cancellations (including those preemptive Atlanta ones) elsewhere.

And Palm Beach is also reporting excessive delays. That airport, by the way, handles a lot of private jets (NetJets accounted for most of the takeoffs and arrivals there today) -- and the swells were evidently trying to make it home before the blizzard.

This is a very big travel mess that won't go away for days.

Courage, as the man used to say.

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