Crew members had called in sick, US media quoted a statement from the airline United. The Flight Aware website counted nearly 170 canceled United flights on Friday. “We are now looking from day to day,” said United spokesman Joshua Freed.
It could be that some flights will be canceled on Saturday. The airlines Delta and JetBlue also canceled dozen of flights on December 24th. The omicron variant is now dominant in the USA. The number of corona cases had recently skyrocketed.
The German Lufthansa had canceled intercontinental flights shortly before Christmas because so many pilots had called in sick. A company spokesman said on Thursday that connections across the North Atlantic, for example to Boston, Houston and Washington, were particularly affected from December 23 to 26. It is in this traffic area that passengers can most easily be rebooked. A return flight to Japan has also been canceled.
“We planned with a very large buffer. But that is not enough for the extremely high sick rate,” said the spokesman. He did not want to speculate about a connection with the Omikron, since Lufthansa was not informed about the nature of the illnesses.
Source: Nachrichten
