A Texas meteorologist was detained in Milwaukee and Chicago for two days after his flights back home were canceled six times, as airports around the country begin their fourth day of travel misery owing to storms and pandemic-era personnel shortages.
Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with KBTX News, detailed his struggles getting to and from an American Meteorological Society Broadcast Conference in Milwaukee in a series of tweets over the weekend.
According to Flight Aware, more than 700 aircraft arriving or departing from the United States were canceled on Sunday, with over 1,000 delayed.
Delta fared the worst among the American carriers, with 6% of its total flights canceled on Sunday, while United Airlines saw 3% of its flights canceled and 4% delayed. On Sunday, 5% of American Airlines’ flights were delayed, which Winkley was dealing with over the weekend.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, and Chicago O’Hare Airport were among the hardest damaged.
The travel woes came after 8,900 delays and 1,470 cancellations hampered US travel on Friday, while over 1,700 were canceled on Thursday due to storms in the southeast and northeast.
More than 4,000 flights have been canceled across the United States since then.
Winkley’s journey began on Monday, when he encountered a four-hour delay from Dallas-Fort Worth to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport.
When he finally arrived, he said, a big storm was hammering Milwaukee, and the captain had to circle the tarmac three times before declaring, ‘We don’t have enough gas, we’re heading for Madison.’
They then lingered on the tarmac in Madison, Wisconsin, for a while, waiting for the storms to pass, and he finally landed in Milwaukee at 7 p.m., but had to wait again since his luggage was put on a later aircraft.
Winkley was supposed to arrive in the region around 12.40pm, he wrote.
That would have been enough for the traveling meteorologist, but as he attempted to return home on Friday, his flight from 5.30pm to 7pm was delayed.
The plane soon landed on the tarmac, he added, and people began to deplane, but they were not permitted to board.
‘There’s a fault, and I don’t feel comfortable flying the plane,’ the captain later added.
After his flight was delayed until 8.30 a.m., Winkley booked a hotel room, but at 12 a.m., he received a push message that the flight had been delayed again until 11.45 a.m.
So, on Saturday morning, he tweeted that he observed the plane parked at the gate at Milwaukee International Airport, but officials said it would take another four to five hours to put a new item on the plane – a control valve, which he stated ‘controls how fast the plane goes.’
At that time, he said, American Airlines executives offered the passengers a bus to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which was about an hour and a half away.
The jet arrived two hours later, according to Winkley, but was delayed further due to mechanical troubles.
‘Meanwhile, those who were left waiting on the original flight at [Milwaukee] are about to take off,’ he added. ‘@AmericanAir: This is no longer adorable.’
Winkley was finally able to board the jet, but maintenance staff returned soon after to ‘repair something in the cockpit.’
After nearly an hour, the repair technicians were unable to resolve the issue and were instructed to deplane.
At the same time, individuals who had stuck it out in Milwaukee had arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth, according to Winkley.
According to Joe Reis, a disabled US Army veteran, the delays and cancellations have prevented him from returning home from his honeymoon and obtaining the charger for his hearing aides, which is in his hold luggage.
‘Instead of a lovely honeymoon, it turned into a really horrible airline ride waiting for this hell hole to finally let us leave,’ Reis claimed, adding that he had to sleep on the floor on Saturday. ‘Because I need hearing aids, my charging port is really in my backpack in Omaha.’
Brooke Osborne, a new mother, repeated the comments, claiming she was out of diapers and formula for her 11-month-old kid, Carson.
‘We’ve just been giving her more food throughout the day and fewer bottles because all of her formula is in our checked suitcase, which is in Omaha,’ she explained to the local media site.
Rachel England, another passenger who was trapped in Atlanta waiting for her trip to Omaha, claimed she had been there since Friday.
‘We’ve been there since like 6:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. the night before,’ England explained to 11 Alive on Saturday.
‘I told [Delta], ‘This is your fault.’ “You guys get me the hotel reimbursement,” she continued. ‘I made care to buy flight insurance in case something like this happened,’ she says.
Delta issued the following statement regarding the delays and cancellations: ‘We apologies for any inconvenience and delay customers have suffered as a result of challenges largely caused by weather, ATC, and crew resources.’
‘Delta employees continue to work hard to provide the services that our customers have come to expect from us, and we are working fast to fix travel concerns and get customers to their destinations.’
Another flight he was scheduled to take was canceled by American Airlines at 11.09 p.m., ‘once again leaving us stranded for the night,’ and he and his crew decided to just take a morning flight to Austin.
They finally touched in in Texas on Sunday morning, as passengers around the country faced significant delays and cancellations for Father’s Day weekend.
According to FOX 5, more than 2.2 million travelers per day have passed through security checkpoints at US airports so far in June, up 22% from the same time last year but still down 13% from the same period before the pandemic.
The delays are being caused in part by ongoing storms across the United States as a result of a heat dome that formed over the Midwest and South last week, producing ideal conditions for unexpected tornadoes and showers.
The persistent pattern of disgruntled travelers and a large number of cancellations prompted Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to order airline CEOs to clean up their act and avoid another flying disaster before July 4.
Buttigieg, like millions of other travelers, is fed up with what appears to be continual cancellations without even an apology from the airlines.
The father-of-two has given airline officials a two-week deadline to clean up the problem and ensure travelers can enjoy a patriotic weekend and summer without worrying about airport security.
He’s urged them to’stress-test’ operations ahead of the next big holiday, which means travel companies may end up canceling more flights if they find they won’t have the resources to operate them.
‘At the end of the day, they have to deliver,’ Buttigieg said on Today. On Thursday, the Democrat met with top airline executives to warn them about the Memorial Day calamity, which resulted in the cancellation of 2,700 flights.
Buttigieg wrote on Friday, ‘Air travelers should be able to expect reliable service when demand recovers to pre-pandemic levels.’
Travelers should ready themselves for a seemingly harder travel season, since there are fewer pilots in the cockpit and fewer TSA agents demanding to pull laptops out of baggage.
There were approximately 50,000 TSA agents prior to the epidemic, but that number has dropped to 46,000 in the last two years.
During the peak of the epidemic in 2020, several TSA checkpoints were shuttered, causing congestion at already overcrowded ports.
Furthermore, the TSA lost a large number of employees as a result of the vaccine mandate last year. Official figures on how many agents were lost to other employment during the pandemic have not been disclosed, but the agency is hiring across the country.