Thousands of U.S. flights cancelled as winter storm hits mid-Atlantic

More than 3,000 U.S. flights and about 4,700 worldwide were canceled by late afternoon Monday on the East Coast, according to tracking service FlightAware.

A winter storm that hit the mid-Atlantic on Monday combined with pandemic-caused shortages of airline workers to push flight cancellations to a holiday-season high, creating more frustration for travelers just trying to get home.

More than 3,000 U.S. flights and about 4,700 worldwide were canceled by late afternoon Monday on the East Coast, according to tracking service FlightAware. Another 12,500 flights were delayed, including 5,600 in the U.S.

Travelers could take hope from an improving weather forecast: Airlines had canceled fewer than 400 U.S. flights scheduled for Tuesday.

First, however, they had to contend with a winter storm that dumped several inches of snow on the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and central Maryland before quitting Monday afternoon.

The cancellations and delays just added to the despair felt over the weekend by holidays travelers trying to get home.

On social media, travelers complained about late cancellations, lost bags and long hold times to reach anybody in airline customer service. Some said they slept in airports and didn’t know when they would get home.

With the spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant, the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. has tripled over the past two weeks and topped 400,000 on Sunday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

The toll of grounded flights in the U.S. was in the few hundreds per day the week before Christmas, then soared past 1,000 a day, as airlines blamed crew shortages caused by the virus.