Photo: Brandon Bell (Getty Images)
When my husband drove me to the San Antonio Airport early one Tuesday morning, lightning bolts speckled the sky so regularly that I thought I was still dreaming. We pulled into the departure lanes and found a terrifying number of people curled up outside and sleeping as baggage control snaked through Terminal B with an intensity I’ve never seen this early in the morning. Normally you would expect the first flight of the morning to be full of business travelers. Instead, these were gaunt families, tired couples, and disheveled people still in their work clothes. I didn’t think twice; With no baggage to check in, I raced through the TSA checkpoint.
It wasn’t until I boarded my flight to Dallas / Fort Worth that I found out what had happened. Ours was the first flight to the Texas hub in over 14 hours. Uncharacteristic tornadoes and severe thunderstorms had ravaged the northern part of the state, landing hundreds of planes and diverting hundreds of others. People had waited in lines at American Airlines for hours to be rebooked onto another flight, receive a refund, be escorted to a hotel, or just get a voucher for a compensated snack. When we arrived in Dallas, the crews that should have been dropped off on an earlier flight hadn’t made it, compounding the already difficult staff shortage. We sat at our gate for half an hour, waiting for an available gate agent to open the door.
I had some shitty flights and unexpected weather delays on my day, but the situation in Dallas was particularly worrying. Friends in the area said they stopped counting how many tornadoes they were either warned about or saw rising in the clouds.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a native of Dallaser, shaking her head. “It totally bothered DFW.”
“The same in Houston,” another Texan spoke up. She was unlucky that her stay there was postponed due to the weather.
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And that’s nothing new. “Unparalleled weather“Was responsible for year-round delays as air traffic recovers from its post-COVID slump. An increasing number of severe storms in locations where such weather was previously absent, or rapidly spreading forest fires, rising sea levels, or extreme heat can result in your flights being canceled more often than you may be used to. We’ll likely even face stricter weight regulations on flights, as hotter weather means less dense air, which means planes have to be faster when taking off, which means we’ll end up saving weight.
Or what Airport technology Put it:
…The other half [of the changes to air travel], which is rather less openly discussed, is adapting airports and commercial air traffic as a whole to the environmental impacts of climate change.
These effects include an increased frequency of delayed and canceled flights due to more difficult weather conditions and changing wind patterns; Damage to important airport infrastructure from higher summer temperatures; and flooding of runways and taxiways due to increased precipitation and the effects of rising sea levels, some of which currently appear to be inevitable.
The article goes on to say that when many of these weather patterns occur without warning or when many of these weather patterns occur without warning or when they develop very differently than expected, it is difficult to prepare for or mitigate a disaster. And if things continue on this path, climate-related disruptions will be just as regular as overpriced airport food.
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