Kansas City, Missouri (KCTV) — Nearly 100 flights were canceled at KCI Thursday morning, leaving the airport nearly empty.
Thanks to phone alerts, the days of people finding out about cancellations after they arrive and huddling in halls waiting to be rescheduled are over.
Perhaps that’s why no one was annoyed when they arrived on their rescheduled flight. They were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Leavenworth and were able to see what they had been hoping for all along.
“These kids wanted them now, so we got them,” laughs mom Lauren Heintzelmann.
And flight issues allowed her daughters, Emma Cantu, 8, and Avery Cantu, “nearly 10,” to play in the snow before leaving town.
“I love snow because I was able to throw two big snowballs,” explained Emma.
“It was like a fresh new coat of snow, all clean, so we could destroy it,” Avery explained.
Two sisters and a brother from Lawrence, all in their 20s, spent hours roaming the halls as cancellations started late.
“I’ve been very busy,” said Cameron Wood. “We arrived around 8am because her first flight was at 10. Then she kept getting pushed back, pushed back, pushed back, and finally she got canceled around 2.00.” .”
They were heading to Cancun to meet another family who had flown in from Los Angeles. Now they spend the night in Austin first.
“I’m flying to Austin tonight and Cancun tomorrow,” explained Joey Wood.
“We are all excited,” exclaimed Cameron Wood. “We are going to get it done eventually.”
Deputy Aviation Commissioner Justin Meyer said the runways and roads were ready this morning, but the airline had to consider a connected national network and made preemptive cancellations the day before.
“So we’ve found that some airline partners are aggressively adjusting their schedules so that there aren’t many aircraft scheduled to spend the night in snowstorm-like conditions,” Meyer explained. did. “So what we saw was some cancellations they made earlier in the day, but as we’re going through [the day], the schedule is starting to look a lot better and is very healthy for the weekend. ”
Sure enough, by the time the sun went down, cars were piling up outside as it started to look like a typical holiday travel day, with planes starting to line back up.
Flight tracking website flightaware.com shows that 50 flights in and out of KCI have already been canceled on Friday, but that’s far better than Thursday’s 89 canceled flights.
To put it into perspective, there were just 19 cancellations on Wednesday.
Copyright 2022 KCTV. All rights reserved.