Jan. 07--The major airlines serving Chicago airports are bracing for more weather-related delays and cancellations Tuesday, a day after snow and record-setting cold led to more than 1,600 area flight cancellations.
It will likely be several days until commercial air service at O'Hare International and Midway airports returns to normal, airline officials said Monday, emphasizing safety concerns as the bitter cold that gripped the Midwest spreads to the East Coast and Deep South.
The expected air travel troubles come on the heels of a weekend when some passengers were stranded in airport terminals in Chicago and elsewhere waiting for flights and hunting down luggage lost during missed connections.
More than two-thirds of Monday's 2,400 scheduled flights at O'Hare were canceled. Southwest, which operates the vast majority of flights out of Midway, ended up canceling almost half of its more than 200 scheduled departures Monday.
If there was a silver lining to Monday's scheduled cutbacks, many of the fewer flights that did operate were more or less on time, officials reported.
Still, the airlines face an uphill slog while trying to reposition planes and personnel after 2014's first major snowstorm.
Dangerously low temperatures prompted safety precautions that limited the amount of time -- as little as 15 minutes consecutively -- that ramp workers and baggage handlers could spend outdoors Monday.
Meanwhile, new federally mandated rest rules for pilots that took effect Saturday are causing some crew-staffing challenges.
"Complicated by the weather, it hasn't been an ideal rollout of the new rest rules certainly,'' said Dan Swanson, a Boeing 767 pilot at United Airlines.
Aircraft-refueling presented one of the biggest problems during Monday's record-setting subzero temperatures.
Similar fueling problems plagued American Airlines starting early Monday morning at O'Hare International Airport. American's first plane out -- a generally reliable 5:30 a.m. flight to Miami -- didn't leave until 9:15 a.m.
The problem wasn't fuel itself freezing, but equipment used to pump fuel froze, American spokesman Mary Frances Fagan said.
"We figured out what we need to do for (Tuesday)," she said. "We'll take steps to make sure we don't have those issues or we can resolve the issues much more quickly."
The cold also hampered refueling for United, which was operating a limited schedule Monday as it pre-emptively canceled many of its O'Hare flights.
"Some facilities and equipment don't work as quickly as a normal cold day," United spokeswoman Mary Ryan said. "We are able to fuel our aircraft, but fuel-pumping is slower than usual."
De-icing planes at the gates and getting them airborne before ice could form on wings did not present a major obstacle Monday, spokespeople for several airlines said.
The airlines at O'Hare canceled more than 1,600 of approximately 2,400 flights originally scheduled for Monday, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation. It exceeded the more than 1,300 flights that the carriers canceled on Sunday at O'Hare.
The result was that O'Hare's runways had plenty of capacity on Monday -- the ability to land more than 100 planes each hour -- but demand was greatly reduced due to the airline schedule reductions.
It was in stark contrast to Sunday, when strong northerly winds and snow-contaminated runways greatly limited the use of O'Hare's four parallel east-west runways, forcing the hourly arrival rate to plummet to as low as 32 planes, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tony Molinaro.
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