If you were traveling yesterday, especially to, from or through Texas, then no doubt you know about the severe weather. According to Fox Weather: “Cleanup efforts continue in Texas from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to Houston after severe weather left trails of damage and knocked out power to more than 1 million utility customers on Tuesday. Powerful thunderstorms barreled across the Lone Star State and produced baseball-sized hail and hurricane-force wind gusts that tore roofs from buildings, flipped vehicles and snapped trees like twigs.”
An astonishing video, embedded below, from Dallas Fort Worth, shows just how powerful the winds were. I never thought I would see a parked Boeing 737 plane at a gate get whipped around like a toy. Good thing no one was deplaning as the cabin door was open. You might remember that scary fall two weeks ago when a cleaner fell from the door of an aircraft as his colleague mistakenly pulled the stairs back too soon.
Even if you weren’t flying via Texas but were scheduled to be on an American Airlines or Southwest Airlines plane, there’s a good chance your flight was delayed or canceled. According to FlightAware.com, American Airlines (AA) canceled 507 of their flights yesterday and Southwest Airlines (SWA) canceled 267. AA delayed 1,339 and SWA delayed 1,268 so it was a miserable day to fly for many travelers.
I was stuck in Dallas once thanks to severe weather. I got a room at the Hyatt at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and the sirens went off. I recorded what the warning was like and how nonchalant people were as we made our way to a ballroom where the shelter was. You can watch the video here.
One high-profile passenger stuck in the mess was Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who said she was stuck on a plane for 8 hours on her flight from Washington DC to Houston. According to Business Insider, she called into her show saying, “Oh yeah — eight hours friendly skies of United Airlines. It wasn’t so friendly today, but that’s all right, everybody was nice and patient.” She then said there was “literally no way I could get to a studio in time given what happened on the airline with the weather and mechanical problems.”
Texas airports were hit the hardest and in fact, led the world in delays in cancelations as you can see from the FlightAware graph below.
Dallas-Fort Worth Intl (DFW) canceled 356 flights and delayed 533. Dallas’ Love Field (DAL) canceled 109 and delayed 77. Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) had 69 canceled flights and 381 delayed.
Unfortunately, the DFW and American airlines are still dealing with massive delays and cancellations today. As of 11:45am PT, AA has canceled 241 flights and delayed 661. Southwest has done a great job getting back on track.
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