Eastern Storm Delays LAX Flights
The snowstorm that shut down several airports in the northeastern United States had a nasty cross-country effect at LAX on Monday, causing the cancellation of dozens of eastward flights and stranding thousands of travelers overnight.
Scores of passengers were turned away from ticket counters after being told that flights could resume this morning to Baltimore; Boston; New York City; Newark, N.J.; Philadelphia; and Washington. In the meantime, they were told to go home or to nearby hotels.
Because the weather-related cancellations were not the airlines’ fault, stranded passengers were responsible for finding their own accommodations.
“We’ve handled a lot of complaints. We have a lot of distressed customers,” said Mike Scanlan, general manager for United Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport.
United provided discount hotel coupons for stranded passengers.
“We had at least 15 distressed passengers today,” said Mario Garza, a front desk clerk at the Radisson LAX Hotel. “They are a bit unhappy, but they say, ‘Hey, it could have been worse.’ ”
The flight cancellations had ripple effects: Business meetings and academic conferences had to be aborted because key participants could not attend.
“I was going to get on the plane today to go to Baltimore, but the weather had other ideas,” said Tom Brandt, a Tustin mutual funds salesman who made it only as far as Chicago. After he heard about the storm, he canceled his business trip and caught a plane from Chicago back to Southern California.
“I got more than half-way around the country and had to come back,” Brandt said at LAX as he waited for his wife to pick him up.
An all-day forum at USC on the concentration of media ownership, which had been scheduled for today, was canceled when two members of the Federal Communications Commission could not fly out of Washington, D.C. “It’s been terrible,” said Sandra Ortiz, executive director of USC’s Center for Communication Law and Policy, which organized the conference and had expected more than 200 participants. Airline employees said they did not recall such widespread weather-induced flight interruptions since a 1996 blizzard blanketed the Eastern Seaboard.
In most storms, only one or two airports might close.
“The intensity of the storm has surprised the industry,” Scanlan said.
At LAX on Monday, American Airlines canceled 13 flights, affecting as many as 2,000 travelers.
Hundreds more people were turned away when three Delta Airlines flights and two Southwest Airlines flights were canceled, their operations managers said. United, the largest carrier at LAX, canceled 17 flights, dislocating about 3,000 passengers.
Elsewhere in Southern California, some flights out of Long Beach Airport, Orange County’s John Wayne Airport and San Diego’s Lindburgh Field also had to be canceled.
Many of the flights had been fully booked because of the President’s Day weekend. Even if those flights resume today, airline employees said, more delays are likely as airlines deal with the backlog of passengers.
The passenger traffic at LAX and crowds in lobbies Monday actually appeared lighter than usual, perhaps because many people found out about flight cancellations over the phone and didn’t come to the airport, said Paul Haney, an airport spokesman.
The airlines’ phones were jammed as worried passengers inquired about the status of their flights. Some callers said they had been put on hold for nearly an hour before they could be connected, and others said they couldn’t get through to the airlines by phone at all.
In some terminal hallways, there appeared to be more security personnel and police officers -- whose presence at LAX was beefed up after a Code Orange terrorism alert was declared for the nation -- than there were luggage-toting passengers.
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Times staff writer Scott Martelle contributed to this report.
