Major snowstorm impacting Sea-Tac Airport
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UPDATE: 2:08 p.m. on Feb. 12, 2019
The verdict is in: It’s the snowiest month at Sea-Tac Airport in 50 years. Over the past week and a half, the National Weather Service reports an overall snowfall total of more than 20 inches at Sea-Tac.
All that wintry weather has created plenty of challenges, including for our operations. The snow has finally let up, but it’s going to take some time to get things flowing normally. To help do that, we’ve pre-canceled additional flights in and out of Sea-Tac for today – which decreases the number of aircraft landing and departing – to ease congestion, and give us some breathing room.
If your flight has been impacted, you’ll receive an email notification from us. To help our guests adjust their travel plans, we also extended our flexible travel policy for those who are impacted by the winter storms and need to change their flights in and out of Seattle.
When our guests have a frustrating travel experience, so do we. We always want you to have a great flight. If your travel day hit a roadblock recently, we apologize and promise our employees are working hard to get you where you need to go – safely.
We know that information is power, and as a guest, it’s easy to feel in the dark in these situations. Here’s a look at several of the key issues we faced:
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- Snow, snow, snow. Another 6 inches bombarded Sea-Tac starting mid-afternoon yesterday. At times, there were near whiteout conditions.
- There was so much snow falling at certain points, it impacted our operations. There were moments when deicing procedures had to be stopped, or planes had to be deiced multiple times because of the intensity of the snow. Crews needed more time and fewer planes to work on to make sure the procedures were done safely.
- The intense snowfall slowed the departure process from pushback, taxi time and deicing times. That meant planes were parked at the gates longer, leaving other aircraft (and passengers) on the tarmac waiting much longer than usual.
- During the snowstorms, the FAA has periodically activated ground stops to prevent arriving aircraft from landing. That happened again Monday for several hours. That’s in additional to ground delay programs at Sea-Tac, which slows down operations at the airport by putting more spacing between planes arriving and departing.
- These extreme weather events just don’t impact the movement of our planes, but also our people. It’s important that our flight crews don’t exceed their FAA-regulated duty period – that’s the allowable length of a safe workday for pilots and flight attendants. If the crew exceeds that duty period, flights are delayed or even canceled.
- In the days ahead, we’ll also need time to reposition our flight crews and aircraft as we get our operations back to normal, especially since Seattle is our primary hub. That could also require further delays and cancellations.