The winter storm that swept through the U.S. and Eastern Canada over the last 24 hours is causing all kinds of travel headaches today (Feb. 23).
The website flightaware.com reports 108 Air Canada Jazz flights had been cancelled as of 3 :30 p.m. Eastern Time. That’s roughly 23% of all flights. For mainline Air Canada, the website was showing 31 cancellations, or six per cent. WestJet had only a 4% cancellation rate as of that time (14 flights), but Swoop was showing 14 cancelled flights; 24% of their scheduled total for the day.
Toronto Pearson airport was showing 81 outbound cancellations (14%) and 66 inbound (11%) today (Thursday), while Montreal Trudeau was at 29 outgoing cancellations (10%) and 26 inbound (eight per cent). Ottawa was showing 14 cancelled outbound flights (14%) and 10 cancelled inbound flights (9%).
Things appeared considerably worse in the U.S. Flightaware said 1,048 flights have been cancelled in the U.S. already today.
For Wednesday, there were 1,772 cancelled flights in the U.S., flightaware.com said. Nearly 50% of outgoing and incoming flights were cancelled in Minneapolis, and roughly 30% in Detroit. For Toronto Pearson on Wednesday, 82 outbound flights (15%) and 110 inbound flights (20%) were cancelled.
Air Canada Jazz on Wednesday had 87 flights cancelled (19%), while Air Canada was showing 41 cancellations (eight per cent). WestJet on Wednesday had 31 cancellations (10%), while their subsidiary airline, Swoop, had 19 cancellations (41%).
Southern Ontario was hit by a snowstorm overnight that saw many areas (including mine) hit with between 15 and 20 cm of snow (six to eight inches).
Blizzards, snow dumps and ice have hit a huge swath of the western and northern US stretching from California to New York and New England, with much of the upper Midwest experiencing particularly heavy snowfalls, CNN reports. More than 60 million people were under winter weather alerts early Thursday, and there’s even a blizzard warning out for some areas of southern California for the weekend.
