Live updates for the fourth of July: Sausage eating competition and travel news
More than 4.5 million passengers flooded US airports on Friday and Saturday, with a total of 13 million passengers to, from or within the United States expected to have passed by the end of this fourth July weekend.
For many of these passengers, however, travel plans were changed due to flight delays and cancellations caused by a boom in travel demand combined with extensive staff shortages. From Friday to Sunday, airlines flying within, into or out of the United States canceled more than 1,400 flights, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website, and stranded and angered some passengers on their way to long-awaited summer vacations. In addition, more than 14,000 US flights were delayed this holiday weekend, according to the website’s data.
The experience has been frustrating for some passengers on US airlines. On Saturday, 1,048 – or 29 percent – of Southwest Airlines flights were delayed, as was 28 percent of American Airlines flights, according to FlightAware. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines had similar problems, with 21 percent and 19 percent of their flights delayed. On Sunday, in the middle of the holiday weekend, it seemed that travelers got a respite from the worst ailments, with about three quarters of the delays and half as many cancellations as the day before.
From 07:00 Eastern time on Monday, there were more than 400 delays and 100 cancellations at US airports.
In a typical month, about 20 percent of flights are delayed or canceled, according to Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline chief who now operates the airline RW Mann & Company. But this holiday weekend, he said, it was about 30 percent. “It’s a little worse than usual,” he said.
As airlines are facing a shortage of pilots, poor weather conditions and delays in air traffic control, it appears that some are struggling to cope with passenger volumes approaching or in some cases exceeding prepandemic levels. On Friday, the Transportation Safety Administration examined more passengers – 2.49 million people – than on any other day this year. It surpassed the 2.18 million travelers who were screened on July 1, 2019, before the pandemic.
Nevertheless, travel to and from airports in the United States seemed to go better than in many other parts of the world. On Sunday, airlines had delayed about half of all flights departing from Toronto Pearson International Airport, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and Frankfurt Airport, while around 40 per cent of flights from London Heathrow were delayed.
On Monday, Australian airports were hit hard, with almost 60 per cent of departures from Sydney Airport delayed, while the airports in Brisbane and Melbourne did not fare much better. SAS, the Scandinavian airline, said on Monday that their pilot union had called a strike over pay, which would lead to the cancellation of 50 percent of the flights, and affect around 30,000 passengers daily. The money-losing airline, which operates as the national airline in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, called the move “devastating”.
