About 12 hours into the current winter storm in the Northeast, and I have to say this is one of the worst for air travel I've seen.

It basically shut down PHL, EWR, LGA and JFK since around 10am EDT, and severly affected BOS as well. Those are some of the busiest airports in the nation, with significant operation by AA, DL, CO, B6 and US.

So, what are the scorecards?

B6 (Jetblue) canceled lots of flights early, including a lot of red-eyes last night, and got criticized for it, as JFK was totally operational early this morning. They have their reasons, as they don't want to strand its whole fleet at JFK. However, their phone and web systems are still horrible for most of the day, and passengers can't get information.

AA, DL canceled all their departures from JFK and LGA mid-morning on, and US did the same at PHL and LGA. Incoming flights were accommodated till around 11am; after that the only arrivals are international ones.

CO also canceled most domestic flights into EWR since mid-morning, using all available landing slots for its planes coming back from Europe. A few flights also departed, including Tokyo and Beijing. However, it shut down everything by mid-afternoon as well, and some inbound domestic flights got to Raleigh-Durham or Charlotte and have remained there.

The European airlines continue to arrive at EWR and JFK throughout the afternoon. A few managed to take off and departed back to Europe, but many others seem to be stuck at those two airports right now too.

With a lot of people traveling in and out the region for spring break and most airlines filing 80% or more of their seats, this is really really ugly.

Meanwhile, Delta will operate DL16 non-stop from ATL to BOM, without the stop at JFK.

It just took off for a scheduled flight time of 16:43. 8,510 miles. That should be a record for furthest revenue flight on a 777-200ER, 450 miles longer than EWR-HKG.

I'm glad that I'm out of the country at the moment and enjoying exceptionally beautiful, spring like weather in Prague. Flying to Budapest on Monday morning..

I guess all the airlines learned their lesson in the last few months. Instead of "pretending" that they will take off, and holding their paxs inside the aluminum tubes for hours and hours, they are just cancelling. Good move!

It will probably take couple of days to recover as the planes/crews have to be repositioned to their destinations, so this freak storm will have an effect on the entire national network and in some cases international as well.

I'm about to head to O'Hare--I have some reservations on hold that must be ticketed in person (using vouchers) by today. Decent weather here, but United also cancelled most of its flights to LGA, BOS, PHL, etc. yesterday, and I'm dreading the state of the ticketing lines. But you gotta do what you gotta do...

Continental has canceled all flights out of EWR until noon, except the flight to Tokyo. It seems like they're using this morning to reset.

Jetblue is starting flights now out of JFK. Most carriers are starting now at LGA. So, some good news there.

Some of the European carriers that arrived late yesterday did take off, scattered throughout the night. For example, BA 114 left JFK at 5am (scheduled: 9:30p). AF7 left at 4am (scheduled 8:20p). Etc.

Sounds like things got very, very bad for some flights at JFK.

The New York Times says one planeful of passengers sat on the tarmac for 14 hours, others for nine or more. Ugh.

http://tinyurl.com/2znw2b

ms_go, this is probably too late for you, but I flew into O'hare yesterday morning fearing the worse for my Providence-bound flight. Turns out 95% of United flights were on-time, in fact, only a handful of flights were cancelled to LGA, IAD, EWR, JFK, and BWI. I really lucked out, as the storm blew out to sea and gave the crews a chance to clean up the runways a bit. However, my flight had, according to the flight attendant 74 standbys from the day before's cancellations. Hope to got out of O'Hare on time!

Thanks, brushfire. I hope your travels were on time yesterday.

I actually wasn't traveling yesterday--I just had to ticket a reservation for a future trip (had to do it in person because I was using re-fare vouchers, and the reservation expired at midnight last night). Surprisingly at 7;50am, there was no line at the future ticketing desk, although the agent there told me it was a mess the day before. I was done in less than 10 minutes. My biggest problem was the traffic jam on the way in caused by a bad accident just before the entrance to the parking garage.

I did glance at the monitors and noticed some blocks of cancelled arrivals from Montreal, LGA, Boston, Albany, etc., but just as you said, I saw very few cancelled or delayed departures--thought that looked like good news. The main ticket counters had fairly long lines, but that's often the case there.

Thanks, Worktowander, for posting the updates. I read them last night, but forgot to update this thread. Cathay Pacific has a flight on the tarmac for 9.5 hours, Air Maroc 14, and there are others. Ice is a nasty thing on airplanes.

As for cancellations, storms always affect the hub carrier the most. It's the same anywhere, any airline.

For example, snow storm in Chicago will affect UA and AA the most; New York CO and B6 (Jetblue). Last December, fog forced BA to cancel all UK domestic fligths from LHR for several days while basically all other airlines operate as usual.

Thought I'd pass along my 2 cents to this post since I was in the middle of that disaster last Fri. 6 of us scheduled on CO 510 IAH - EWR leaving at 8:50 am. Flight initially not full but shortly after scheduled departure, about 25 more people boarded. Most were CO pilots, FAs and, as I learned from a pilot sitting next to me, CO employees being sent to help with EWR situation. Some were already scheduled to fly out of EWR (pilot next to me flies EWR - DUB route). [My group was concerned about whether we'd be able to take off in light of storm in northeast, but I told them that if any flights were getting through, this was going to be one of them with all the CO people on board needed in EWR] Left 35 min late and arrived at EWR only 20 min late, at 1:45 pm. No one to open jetway upon arrival and after 3 calls from the pilot, door finally opened after sitting at gate for 20 minutes. After deplaning, learned of the 100s of flights cancelled. Guess we were also lucky. EWR was chaotic. Absolutely NO cabs available. Buses not running on schedule - when and if you could get a seat. Not a single ticket available on Amtrak for the rest of the day anywhere from Washington to Boston. Finally took NJ Transit into Penn Station NY with everyone crammed in like sardines. Taxi line at Penn Station over 2 blocks long. Finally found limo driver who took all 6 of us to hotel in Financial District. Time from deplaneing flight in EWR to hotel in NYC: 3.5 hours. Time of flight from IAH to EWR: 3.3 hours. We did not have fun, but we did get there.

We flew into the mess at JFK at 3pm 3/16 returning from our OAT trip to Egypt. Reminded me of the movie Langoliers...

We sat on the plane looking out the windows seeing no planes or ground vehicles moving, no people...very eery.

In the AA terminal there were 1,000+ people standing in ONE line. What a joke. There was nothing to eat or drink, nowhere to sit except the cement floor.

I phoned my Mom in Calif. to ask if she would please spend 30 min on the phone rebooking us..She did a fabulous job and got us on the 0630 flight out the next AM.

Next problem was no hotels, no cabs, buses?? who knew. We decided to camp out at the airport since we had to be back in line by 0300 or so. Spent the night on the floor in the Delta terminal baggage claim area with another couple from our group. Carpet, warmth, smaller, quieter than the AA terminal.

I understand weather delays, and we weren't upset about the cancellations. What upset me was the complete lack of planning by the airport/airlines for coping with/caring for thousands of passengers stranded within the airport during a winter storm. Hello, this is JFK New York. You have winter storms ALL THE TIME. WHY ARE YOU SO INCOMPETENT?

There was no information about cots, blankets, where to get food, etc. We just had to take turns watching luggage and exploring to figure it out ourselves which was very stressful. I saw unattended luggage sitting around all over the place as people left to use the bathroom, find food, or just sit somewhere else. At some point during the night Delta gave out some blankets and pillows obviously swiped from airplanes. AA Departure area had some cots when we went back in the morning. Not enough of them, and I'm not sure how/when they were doled out.

People were trying to charge cell phones but none of the electric outlets in the AA departure area worked, even the ones meant & advertised for cell phone charging. It was like being in a third world country's airport.

I rarely travel in winter. Now I will think really, really hard before I ever do it again.

We were supposed to fly out of Burlington VT (BTV) to Tucson on 3/17 via Jet Blue. Our flight from BTV was delayed, thus we would miss our connection at JFK to Tucson, and couldnt get us out until Wednesday. JetBlue agreed to refund our airfare which was very generous. Ended up driving to Albany and taking Southwest - all flights were great and on time- even earlay coming back.
Kudos to JetBlue for refunding us even though the storm was out of their control. I will definately fly them again.

Actually, and believe me I'm not defending anything that happened at JFK two weeks ago, winter storms of that kind are very rare in the NYC area..NYC is just far enough south and JFK is along the water that most of the time, noreasters coming up the coast bring rain to the NYC area..every winter perhaps there is a snow storm or two but snow is a lot easier to deal with than ice which we got socked with twice this winter.

As with everything else, and again let me repeat nobody is defending anything that happened, there is always a degree of how much do we prepare for and it might be that we won't be able to handle the worst of the worst. Evidently this is what happened here.