Life interrupted: Storms disrupt Juneteenth, Father’s Day air travel in Charlotte
When Brandy Naylor arrived at Charlotte Douglas International Airport late Friday night, she was a day late and several hundred dollars short. As bad, she had missed her 15-year-old son’s baseball game, one of the reasons she needed to get home.
After Delta canceled her 3 p.m. flight from LaGuardia Airport to Columbia Thursday, Naylor coughed up $400 for an unplanned hotel stay in New York. The next day she steered a rental car to Philadelphia International Airport to board a different flight, not to her planned destination but as close as she could get.
So it went over the Father’s Day and Juneteenth weekend. Baseball games, holiday dinners, comedy shows and thousands of dollars are just a fraction of what travelers lost due to flight cancellations and delays up and down the East Coast. Travelers found themselves unable to depart from Charlotte Douglas International Airport as planned or landing there unplanned.
From Sunday to late afternoon Monday, 389 flights to and from Charlotte were delayed and 50 were canceled, according to data from flight-tracking site FlightAware.
Weather at the close of last week was the main cause for disruption at the Charlotte airport, according to Tammy Jones of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Our operation is largely normalized at this point, though we do see a few residual cancellations and delays continuing today,” American Airlines East Coast spokesperson Andrew Trull told The Charlotte Observer Monday afternoon. “Expect that we will continue to move toward the more normal operations through the remainder of the day and into the week.”
Interruptions in Charlotte had slowed by Monday afternoon, according to FlightAware. But as of 4:30 p.m., 13 flights were canceled and 129 were delayed arriving and departing in Charlotte on Monday.
Charlotte airport a “madhouse”
South Carolina resident Robbin Vaughn’s relaxing vacation in Saint Lucia last week ended with a canceled flight back to the U.S.
When American Airlines canceled her flight Thursday she couldn’t pay $450 for another night at her resort in Saint Lucia. She had booked the room seven months ago and didn’t even know if one was available.
She ended up spending even more — $2200 for the next flight out on a Delta plane to Charlotte. When she arrived at Charlotte Douglas, it was late and the terminal was quiet.
“But we got down to the luggage area and I’m like where the heck did all these people come from?” Vaughn said.
Naylor, who flew into Charlotte on the same day, said her terminal was “standing room only.”
“I use Charlotte airport a lot and I have never seen it as packed as it was,” Naylor said.
With disappointment, came apologies. John Heffrom reached out to his Queen City fans after his flight was canceled, causing the Comedy Zone to cancel its weekend shows in Charlotte.
“Charlotte, I tried, I was on four different flights, all four flights got canceled so I couldn’t make it from Detroit to Charlotte,” the comedian said in a video on the comedy club’s Instagram.
The majority of cancellations were from American Airlines, data show. American Airlines accounted for 69 out of the 88 delayed flights Monday and 152 out of the 260 delayed flights Sunday.
Storms start a domino effect
Delays and cancellations in Charlotte were part of a wider disruption that triggered a demand for airline flights that outstripped the supply. Nationwide, 1,700 flights were canceled on Thursday and 1,400 were canceled on Friday, the Associated Press reported.
Bad weather put limitations on where an aircraft can fly, Jones of the FAA said.
“Airlines have been unable to bounce back when they encounter severe weather, as we saw this weekend,” Jones wrote in an email to the Observer.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is pushing airlines to take steps to ensure they can operate planned flights this summer now that demand for air travel is swelling again, the Associated Press also reported.
Charlotte Douglas is the fifth busiest airport worldwide for arrivals and departures, according to a 2021 report from Airports Council International.
This story was originally published June 20, 2022 at 5:22 PM with the headline "Life interrupted: Storms disrupt Juneteenth, Father’s Day air travel in Charlotte."
