Thousands of would-be travellers received the same troubling message on Thursday: a last-minute cancellation of their Christmas flights on Friday and Saturday because of the recent spike of omicron cases, including among airline workers.

The number of cancellations globally as of Friday morning added up to more than 3,000, the Flight Aware website showed. It was the latest blow to the holiday season, mainly caused by the new and highly transmissible omicron variant, which now accounts for more than 70 per cent of new coronavirus cases in the US.

Delta Air Lines said that it had cancelled about 135 flights for Friday after exhausting “all options and resources”, including rerouting and substituting planes and crews to cover scheduled flights. It attributed the cancellations to “a combination of issues, including but not limited to, potential inclement weather in some areas and the impact of the Omicron variant”.

United Airlines cancelled at least 150 flights scheduled to leave dozens of airports on Friday — along with 44 more that were supposed to take off on Saturday, according to Flight Aware. Other airlines, including JetBlue and Allegiant, did likewise.

In Australia, dozens of flights were cancelled at airports in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne as coronavirus cases in the country surged to their highest since the start of the pandemic.

And in Europe, a spokeswoman for the Eurostar train service said on Friday morning that because of travel restrictions across the continent, a small number of trains had been cancelled amid a drop in demand.

The US is recording nearly 170,000 new daily cases, a 38 per cent increase over the last two weeks, according to The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker.
United said in a statement that omicron’s “direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation” had led to the cancellations. Crew members have been calling in sick, according to a spokesman, Joshua Freed, who said United had alerted customers as soon as it was able to. And while Freed said he did not expect the airline to cancel more flights, it remained a possibility.

“We are really managing this day by day,” he said. “There may be some more flight cancellations for Saturday. It’s possible.”

New York Times News Service