Airlines delay flights for hours instead of canceling

If you’ve felt like your flights have been delayed rather than canceled altogether this year, you’re not alone.

According to a report by NBC 5's media partners at the Dallas Morning News, this year, airlines heavily improved network reliability. According to travel tracker site Hopper, this October saw the lowest cancellation rate among U.S. departures since 2019. In October, 15% of flights were delayed on departure, down 25% during July.

Passenger delays and cancellations came under intense pressure from consumer watchdogs and politicians after a bumpy ramp-up for airlines after the downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic. Airlines in the U.S. canceled almost 140,000 flights in 2022, the highest number in recent history — except the pandemic-induced cancellations of 2020.

A bumpy 2022 came to a crescendo last December, when snowstorms in Denver and Chicago caused thousands of cancellations, a problem so bad that Southwest’s network completely fell apart and resulted in nearly 17,000 nixed flights around the Christmas holidays.