Another wave of flight cancellations hit Southland airports today, with 63 flights canceled at LAX due to COVID-19 and weather issues as of 6:30 this morning. The airport experienced 208 cancellations on New Year’s Day.
Orange County’s John Wayne Airport reported 21 canceled flights this morning. Long Beach Airport had seven cancellations and 11 flights at Hollywood/Burbank Airport were canceled. On Sunday, there were 10 canceled flights at John Wayne Airport, with nine at Long Beach Airport and seven at Hollywood/Burbank Airport.
The problems are a continuation from last week, when thousand of flights were canceled worldwide on a daily basis, There were 3,382 canceled flights worldwide and 1,936 canceled flights within, into or out of the United States listed this morning on the tracking site FlightAware.com.
On Sunday, FlightAware.com listed 4,197 canceled flights around the world, 2,518 of which involved flights into or out of the United States. The scrapped flights are largely blamed on airline staffing shortages caused by the latest surge in COVID-19 cases fueled by the Omicron variant. Weather issues were also causing some of the cancellations.
“From about 8 p.m. to midnight LAX could see 15,000 passengers per hour, making it a very busy time of the day as people head home from the winter holidays,” the airport tweeted at 2:15 p.m. Sunday. “Please plan to arrive early, and check traffic @FlyLAXstats for upper/lower level drive times.”
