Travelers at Rochester airport delayed by Tuesday’s winter storm

ROCHESTER, N.Y. Flight delays and cancellations in Rochester on Tuesday caused a travel nightmare for some.

The extreme winter weather from cities in the northeast and midwest is to blame. There are a few cancellations for flights tomorrow morning to New York City and D.C., and a midnight flight coming in from New York is canceled.

Other than that it looks like flights should be back on schedule. But Tuesday about 25 percent of flights were canceled, mostly in the northeast. For many travelers, all they wanted was to arrive in Rochester. Now a day later Elena Carr is finally arriving in Rochester. It was hard to hold back the tears!

“I found out during sectionals that my grandma was really sick,” Elena said. “So I had to get home but I really didn’t have a way of getting here. Then my flight got delayed yesterday so I am about 24 hours later than I wanted to be.”

Elena is from Rochester but attends college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She’s on the women’s bowling team. She says the airline didn’t tell her the cause of the cancellations but she assumes it was weather-related since she was supposed to connect through Chicago O’Hare and she heard it was pretty bad.

“I actually got to the airport as they were canceling my flights,” Elena said. “And the soonest they could get me here was this morning at 5:50. So I was able to actually go back to campus and sleep and then get on the flight then. But I couldn’t get home last night.”

Matt Carr and Stephanie Carr, no relation to Elena, were in the same boat. They received notification last night that their flight this morning was canceled. So they had to scramble to rebook a new itinerary.

“We were supposed to fly at 5:30 to Boston but all the flights in Boston were canceled,” Stephanie said. “Our connecting flight changed to DC.”

But when they arrived in DC they were further delayed.

“Yeah we had a little bit of a layover in DC it was not fun but we just got some lunch,” Matt said.

Airport director Andy Moore says it’s been a tough day but they’ve managed well. Tuesday’s delays and cancellations were out of Moore’s hands.

“What happens is airplanes can get out of sequence and have trouble moving to their different locations throughout the day,” Moore said. “And the airlines will preemptively cancel those flights so it doesn’t get stuck somewhere.”

Moore’s advice to travelers is to check with the airlines before heading to the airport.