The flight delays and cancellations started during the Christmas Eve but thousands of flights continue to get cancelled over the New Year’s weekend. The disruptions in the flights have been caused due to COVID-19 related restrictions and the weather conditions. The flight cancellations started to peak during Christmas and affected millions of passengers during the holiday season. As per data from FlightAware, more than 4,730 flights were cancelled on a global basis on January 1, 2022.
This marked the largest day of cancellations ever since the meltdown started during Christmas Eve. Majority of the cancellations were within or out of the United States. In the United States Alone, the number of flight cancellations accounted for 2,600 flights on January 2, 2022 alone. While the global cancellations accounted for 4000. Usually it is noticed that the Sunday is considered as a busy travel day of the week but this Sunday did not seem like a heavy travel day as the Christmas and New Years week wraps.
The Transport Security Administration said that it had expected to screen nearly ten million people from Friday through Monday. The Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and American Airlines each have more than 100 flights cancelled on Sunday. In the last ten days, the airlines including on Sundays have cancelled more than 14,000 flights. The problem is expected to continue in to next week as its takes its time for the airlines to recover from the weather problem alone. Nearly 310 US flights were cancelled for Monday in the United States alone.
The number of cancellations are expected to continue this week as well. Apart from the weather issues, the airlines are also facing staffing problems. A sudden surge of COVID-19 due to the Omicron variant has reported a number of people sick. The impact of it in future cannot be predicted and the airlines are trying their best to notify the passengers beforehand.
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