Thousands of flights disrupted by Helene

AccuWeather

Kathleen Bangs of FlightAware explains how Hurricane Helene has impacted flights for airports across the Southeast region of the United States due to the significant effects of Hurricane Helene.

Transcript

00:00This storm will be impacting flights throughout the system. It's Kathleen Bangs from FlightAware.

00:05Kathleen, it's always good to see you. Thank you for making time for us here. Tropical storm

00:08Helene, still bringing some rain, serious flash flooding. Where are the airport impacts right now?

00:16Well, what we're really seeing today is kind of what you'd expect. Tampa still impacted,

00:20Atlanta of course, and Charlotte having the most cancellations. Some people don't realize

00:25Charlotte is one of the top five busiest airports in the world and a huge cargo hub,

00:30so big impacts there. But the airports are open. Yesterday we had Tallahassee and

00:36Tampa and St. Pete closed. All those airports are open right now.

00:40The weekend, will Florida and Atlanta still have delays and cancellations?

00:46Well, what we're looking at, definitely probably still going to see some out of Atlanta as they

00:50recover. Florida, really, Tallahassee is going to be nice tomorrow, but we're going to see some

00:54more thunderstorms move in to Tampa and Miami. That could affect that. We're definitely seeing

00:59impacts around Appalachia, Nashville, up into DC and Baltimore. What really is going to impact

01:05people is not so much the rain as it is going to be the winds. Like today, there's a lot of areas

01:11with 40 mile an hour winds and even higher gusts. And once they get those strong winds, that really

01:16affects an airport operations because it limits what directions they can take off and land and

01:21how many airplanes they can handle. So if you're in an area where there's going to be strong winds,

01:25that's going to be one of the huge impacts. And of course, just for people getting to airports,

01:29if it's hard for you to get to the airport because there's debris or the power's out or there's

01:34flooding, it's going to be the same thing for airport employees. So we're going to be looking

01:38for that to get back on pace. But compared to Ian, Hurricane Ian like two years ago, cancellations

01:44are only running about 50% of what they were then. So already this has had less impact on the airlines

01:50than say, for example, Hurricane Ian. And we understand that with small scale thunderstorms,

01:55the flight paths work around them and it's kind of a shorter term issue. How do airlines make

02:01adjustments with flight plans when a hurricane is on the map? Well, yeah, they're pretty careful

02:07about that, especially now that everybody's flight tracking and they can see where they go.

02:11The big thing that they do is they try to get airplanes out of harm's way on the ground

02:16because even a big Boeing 737, when you have those winds gusting, especially 70, 80 miles an

02:22hour, that can actually lift up the tail of the airplane and swing those planes around into the

02:27jetway, into gates and cause severe damage. So one of the things they do is they get those

02:32airplanes out of the harm's way of where those hurricanes are coming.

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