Thousands of Flights Canceled As Widespread Winter Weather Sweeps U.S. — What to Know

16.01.2024 - 20:35 / travelandleisure.com / Spirit Airlines / John F.Kennedy / United Airlines / Martin Luther King-Junior

Snowy and frigid weather swept the country over the holiday weekend from Texas and the Midwest to the Northeast, canceling and delaying thousands of flights.

As of Tuesday morning, more than 1,400 flights had been canceled and another 2,300 delayed.

Major airlines issued flight alerts for large swaths of the country, offering to waive change fees and fare differences to postpone flights, including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Spirit Airlines. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also issued several temporary ground stops or ground delays on Tuesday morning, including for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport.

On Monday alone, airlines canceled more than 3,300 flights within, into, or out of the United States, according to flight tracker FlightAware. That was in addition to the more than 10,000 flight delays.

Disruptions were widespread Monday with airports seeing mass cancellations from Houston to Denver, and Chicago to Washington D.C. Southwest Airlines canceled the most flights with more than 780 and saw the most delays with more than 1,700, followed by United Airlines, which is still dealing with the grounding of its Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft and saw a total of 489 cancellations.

Snowy weather blanketed the country from the Midwest to the East Coast over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. In Western New York, more than three feet of snow fell, according to NBC New York. By Monday night, the snow had moved south, blanketing the New York City area in about an inch and a half of snow, the most the city had seen in nearly two years, <a href=«https://twitter.com/NWSNewYorkNY/status/1747232829677896085?ref_src=» https: data-component=«link» data-source=«inlineLink» data-type=«externalLink» data-ordinal=«3»>according to the National Weather Service

In Iowa, where the Iowa Republican caucuses were held on Monday, frigid temperatures fell to the minus 10s made worse by wind chills as low as minus 40, CNN reported.

And in Texas, large parts of the northern part of the state were under hard freeze warnings on Tuesday, according to CBS News Texas, with temperatures potentially plunging below 10 degrees in some areas.