The United States has been crossed since Saturday by the winter storm Frida and by midday, almost as many flights had already been canceled as on the whole of the day on Saturday.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. GMT), 2,337 domestic flights, coming from or arriving in the United States had already been canceled, against 2,749 for the whole of the day on Saturday, according to the FlightAware site.

That's more than half of the 3,942 flights canceled globally on Sunday at the same time.

Strong winds, floods and snowfall have also caused, in addition to cancellations, delays for 4,069 planes in the country.

The Southwest airline, one of the most affected, had to cancel around 400 flights on Sunday morning, she said in an email sent to AFP, and anticipates "additional cancellations".

These weather conditions had forced the company on Saturday to cancel 490 flights, mainly in the Midwest, a region located in the north-central between the Great Lakes and the western plains, out of a planned total of 3,400 flights, the company said. Aerial.

"Our flight this morning was canceled. We had to rent 4x4s to return to Colorado from Texas," Katie Armstrong, a passenger with this airline, testified on Twitter.

"I was due to get home at 10:30 am yesterday morning. And at this point I had 3 canceled flights and one so delayed that I missed my connection," Kayla also tweeted, who did not specify the name. of his company.

Chicago airports, the most affected on Saturday worldwide because of the snowstorm, were on Sunday accompanied in the top ranking by other American airports: Denver (Colorado), Newark (New Jersey), Atlanta (Georgia) , Houston (Texas) or Detroit (Michigan).

More than 22 hours of telephone waiting

This chaos is reminiscent of the chaos experienced by travelers last weekend, just after Christmas, when around 7,500 flights were canceled by airlines around the world.

Because these meteorological conditions come on top of the disturbances linked to the Omicron variant which disrupt air transport.

The Covid-19 prevents many pilots or flight attendants, sick or contact cases, from coming to work, forcing companies to cancel certain flights.

The handling of passengers whose flights have been canceled is thus more complicated, as evidenced on Twitter Eric Crawford, who lamented being notified by the company Delta Airline "an estimated wait of more than 22 hours for be able to have someone online following a flight cancellation ".

Kowshick Boddu explained to him on the social network that he had to take a flight from Fairbanks (Alaska) to San José (California) on December 30 with Air Alaska, "but our flight has been postponed to today (Sunday, Editor's note) , and finally canceled again ??? Long hours on the phone, no answer, and flights that are not rescheduled? Need help! "

The situation should remain complicated on Monday, for the first working day of 2022. Storm Frida will indeed continue on its way to touch the east coast of the United States, bringing snow from Boston to the south of the federal capital Washington.

Almost 500 flights have already been canceled.

© 2022 AFP