rcz77

I have a flight booked for tomorrow, Friday, around 7pm from Pittsburgh to Berlin through Wow Air for almost a week. The problem is, the weather forecast is showing thunderstorms throughout most of tomorrow. My trip is short enough that I might just have to cancel it all together if I can't arrive in Europe by early Monday at latest, but I was really hoping to be able to arrive by early Sunday if my flight has to be delayed. I'm open to arriving in other cities near Berlin sooner and then just taking a train or another flight to get there shortly after.


Anybody know how strict airports tend to be with thunderstorms? I've read that ground crew aren't even allowed on the tarmac with active thunderstorms. I have just over 1 hour to make my connection in Reykjavik, so there's basically no room for delays.


I called Wow Air and they couldn't tell me what might be the next possible flights they could put me on to get to Berlin, and it being a budget airline with a small fleet, I'm not expecting it to be real timely. But they did say my return flight will remain active even if I decide to take a one-way flight with another airline to get to Europe, so that's what I'm thinking of doing Saturday if the prices aren't too outrageous(hopefully my Chase card travel insurance will reimburse me somewhat for the potentially delayed Wow flight).


Can't be sure thunderstorms won't carry over into Saturday though, and if a bunch of flights on Friday get cancelled, I'm not sure how that might affect the scheduled Saturday flights. It would suck to book a Saturday flight on Friday evening, only to find out that it too would be delayed or cancelled just because of the airport having to catch up on all the delays from the thunderstorm the previous night.


Any help appreciated!
​​​​

Christina

I'm no expert, that's for sure, but I have had flights cancelled due to bad rainstorms but it was due to visibility, not just because there was thunder. And I've had flights that couldn't land for the same reason, and we would circle for a while and sometimes be diverted elsewhere within about 100 miles. I think once I had an Air France flight diverted from landing at IAD to BWI, if I recall, due to rainstorms. And once I had a flight diverted from landing at DCA to Richmond, which isn't even that far away.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/weather/faq/#faq4

that's very interesting, in summer about half are due to convective weather which is thunderstorms, apparently, and about 40 pct due to visibility.