Friday, February 04, 2011

Super Bowl Travel Delays Mount As Snow and Ice Cause More Flight Cancellations in Texas

A big mess is underway for Super Bowl travelers to Dallas as large numbers of flights are being canceled once again today and tomorrow.

And the statistics below don't even take into account the hundreds of private-jet flights that will be affected, Super Bowl being one of the biggest annual events for high-flying private jet parties.

This today on commercial airline flights, from FlightAware.com:

"The fallout from the storm is continuing to cause more cancellations in Texas, which is really unfortunate timing considering the Super Bowl is in Dallas on Sunday. 885 flights have been cancelled to/from Houston today and 543 to/from Dallas. Total cancellations so far today are 1,726.

Houston IAH is the primary hub for Continental Airlines. Dallas DFW is the primary hub for American Airlines. Southwest Airlines has hubs at both Dallas Love (DAL) and Houston Hobby (HOU). Temperatures are forecast to get above freezing in Houston in the next few hours, which will allow the roads, ramps, and planes to thaw out so that normal operations can resume this afternoon. However, Dallas is forecast to stay below freezing until tomorrow afternoon.

FlightAware is estimating the total number of affected passengers to be between 700K and 800K.

Yesterday's total is 2,594 and the total for this week is 19,906 -- just shy of 20K.

Real-time cancellation stats: http://flightaware.com/live/cancelled

We expect the traffic levels in Chicago to decline as heavy snow falls for the rest of the evening, and East Coast from D.C. to Boston to seize up due to freezing rain and ice overnight.

Even flights in areas that are largely unaffected are seeing extensive delays due to routings around weather."

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