Travelers waited out widespread delays at U.S. airports on Tuesday, an ominous sign heading into the long July 4 holiday weekend, which is shaping up as the biggest test yet for airlines that are struggling to keep up with surging numbers of passengers.
In some cases, delays ran several hours at airports in the Northeast, as thunderstorms pounded the region.
At various times, the Federal Aviation Administration held up flights bound for LaGuardia Airport in New York and Reagan Washington National and Baltimore-Washington airports near the nation's capital.
By early evening on the East Coast, about 5,500 flights were delayed and more than 1,600 canceled. United Airlines, with a major hub in Newark, New Jersey, canceled about 500 flights or 17% of its schedule, and JetBlue canceled 13% of its flights, according to FlightAware.
Call it the storm before the storm.
The FAA was expecting about 48,000 flights on Tuesday, rising on Wednesday and peaking at more than 52,500 on Thursday, which figures to be the biggest travel day of the holiday period.
People whose travel plans were disrupted took to social media to vent against the airlines. Some swore they would never fly again on whichever airline had done them wrong.
When their United flight in Newark was canceled Sunday night, Margo and Jason Osborne searched for other flights but couldn’t find one. Margo said a United agent wouldn’t let them retrieve their bags either – they would have to pick those up at their final destination, New Orleans — then “made me feel like an idiot” for leaving needed medical supplies in a checked bag.
They saw other people looking for unaccompanied minors, and heard about stranded travelers who spent hours in line or slept at the airport.
“All these poor people are literally just sitting there at the mercy of a company who is not doing anything to help them,” Margo said in an interview. “There is zero customer service right now.”
The Osbornes rented a car – they felt lucky to snag one – and drove 10 hours through the night to Charlotte, North Carolina, to catch an American Airlines flight to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, close to home. Their luggage finally got to New Orleans on Tuesday.
If large numbers of passengers are stranded or delayed this weekend, expect federal officials and the airlines to blame each other for the mess.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose department includes the FAA, has been beating up on the airlines for more than a year. He has accused them of failing to live up to reasonable standards of customer service and suggested that they are scheduling more flights than they can handle.
The airlines are punching back.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby blamed a shortage of federal air traffic controllers for massive disruptions last weekend at its Newark hub.
“We estimate that over 150,000 customers on United alone were impacted this weekend because of FAA staffing issues and their ability to manage traffic,” Kirby wrote in a memo to employees Tuesday night.
The FAA has admitted that it is understaffed at key facilities including one in the New York City region. It is training about 3,000 new air traffic controllers, but most of them won't be ready anytime soon. Last week, the Transportation Department's inspector general said in a report that the FAA has made only “limited efforts” to adequately staff critical air traffic control centers and lacks a plan to tackle the problem.
The good news: Airlines are canceling only 1.5% of U.S. flights this month, a lower percentage than a year ago or in June 2019, the last summer before the pandemic.
On the other hand, delays are running above even their elevated rate in June of last year, when airlines were still rebuilding their work forces.
More than one in every four flights this month has been late — 180,000 in all — and that's with the government-allowed grace period for tardy arrivals and the extra time that airlines build into their schedules to make the numbers look better. At 26%, the rate of late flights is up nearly one-third from 2019.
Meanwhile, traffic has rebounded to roughly pre-pandemic levels. The Transportation Security Administration has screened 2.55 million travelers a day on average this month, down about 1% from the same period in 2019.
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Wyatte Grantham-Philips in Washington, D.C., contributed. Koenig reported from Dallas.
