Shortly after 12:30 p.m. (local time, 2:30 p.m. EDT) along the east coast of the United States, 766 routes to the country had already been suspended.
According to Flight Aware, the number of canceled 766 flights is about 1,000 yesterday and slightly less than 700 on Friday Christmas Eve.
Worldwide, 2,316 routes were suspended today, while 8,071 faced delays.
Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year in air traffic, has begun with the suspension of hundreds of routes in the US, but as the day progressed, the situation worsened, and over the next two days, Major US airlines announced further cancellations.
According to Flight Aware, the airlines with the most cancellations remain Delta, with 131 or 5% of their flight plans canceled today, followed by JetBlue (110 or 10% of suspended itineraries) and United (100 or 4%). Huh.
United says the rise in omicron infections in the United States is having a “direct impact” on flight crew and other United States staff, who need to stay home to recover from their illness and not infect others .
Delta, for its part, attributed the cancellation to Omicron, but also to weather conditions with snow storms that threaten the western United States from Washington state to Southern California.
However, other American airlines, such as American and Southwest, ensured that their operations continued to develop normally and faced few cancellations.
However, these two airlines had to suspend hundreds of trips at the end of October.
The Omicron variant has caused a surge in infections around the world and prompted some European countries such as Germany, Portugal and Finland to impose restrictions on the leisure and hotel sectors.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC, its abbreviation in English), this variant has already become prevalent in the United States, as it accounted for 73.2% of new cases between the 12th and 18th of this month.
With over 816,000, the United States is one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic
