Canceled flights don’t create airport chaos

NEW YORK — Hurricane Sandy has left more than 18,000 flight cancellations in its wake.

Chaos at airports? Hardly.

Not long ago, a powerful storm pounding the Northeast would have brought havoc to some of the nation’s busiest airports: families sleeping on the floor amid mounds of luggage; passengers stuck for hours on planes hoping to take off; and dinners cobbled together from near-empty vending machines.

In the aftermath of Sandy, airports from Washington to Boston are deserted. There are hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded across the U.S. and around the world, but instead of camping out inside airport terminals, they are staying with friends and family or in hotels.

After years of storm mismanagement and the bad public relations that followed, U.S. airlines have rewritten their severe weather playbooks. They’ve learned that it’s best to cancel flights early and keep the public away from airports, even if that means they’ll have a bigger backlog to deal with once conditions improve.

This allows the airlines to tell gate agents, baggage handlers and flight crews to stay home, too — keeping them fresh once they’re needed again.

And by moving planes to airports outside of the storm’s path, airlines can protect their equipment and thereby get flight schedules back to normal quickly after a storm passes and airports reopen.

These precautions make good business sense. They also help the airlines comply with new government regulations that impose steep fines for leaving passengers stuck on planes for three hours or more.

“The last few major storms created such gridlock, and such bad will with their best customers, they just had to shift their behavior,” said Kate Hanni, who heads up the passenger advocacy group Flyers Rights and lobbied for the three-hour rule. “The flying public would rather have their flights precanceled than be sleeping in Chicago on a cot.”

Departure monitors at airports across the Northeast on Monday and Tuesday reflected that new approach.

London: Canceled.

Seattle: Canceled.

Los Angeles: Canceled.

Hong Kong: Canceled.

Houston: Canceled.

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