Storm Brings New Woes to Travelers at JFK
By JAMES BARRON The New York Times
NEW YORK (March 18) - Fourteen hours after boarding a flight to North Africa to take part in a 151-mile marathon across the Sahara, Jeremy Colgan completed an endurance feat of a different kind yesterday. He got off the plane, which never left Kennedy Airport.
The Royal Air Maroc jetliner had circled the airport -- at ground level -- for twice as long as its scheduled flight to Casablanca, Morocco. It was de-iced twice. The second time, it had the bad luck to fall in line behind an airplane that broke down inside the de-icing station.
After the pilot gave up and taxied back to the gate at about 10 a.m., Mr. Colgan, 35, said that a voice on the loudspeaker told a planeload of people whose mood ranged from annoyed to angry: "We deeply apologize for the delay. The gods are against us."
In the ice storm that pelted the New York area overnight, theirs was not the only flight that the gods of weather and travel had in their sights. A number of flights were stuck on the ground for hours at J.F.K. on Friday night and into yesterday after the unexpectedly icy weather apparently strained the capacity for de-icing, creating new headaches at an airport where hundreds of JetBlue passengers were stranded for as long as 10 hours during a snowstorm last month.
The Associated Press reported that a Cathay Pacific flight to Vancouver, British Columbia, was finally canceled yesterday after more than nine hours of waiting at J.F.K.
Hoping for a break in the weather, Delta Air Lines boarded three flights from Kennedy on Friday evening. But the storm continued, and the three flights were eventually canceled. The planes never left the gates.
Many flights were also canceled at La Guardia Airport on Friday, but most flights there appeared to be on schedule yesterday, according to FlightStats.com.
Even after the storm had crawled away, it continued to throw off passengers' plans. Continental Airlines canceled 125 flights in the East yesterday. Most were morning flights at Contintentals big hub at Newark Liberty International Airport, where Continental did not begin operations for the day until noon.
JetBlue, which canceled 400 of its 550 flights on Friday, moved early to avoid any chance of a rerun of its troubles on Feb. 14. A spokeswoman said yesterday that JetBlue was operating 95 percent of its scheduled flights and with only brief delays.
JetBlue Puts Freeze on Flights
The ice and sleet put unusual pressure on Kennedys de-icing operations, which are handled by the private companies that operate the terminals.
"This storm was the worst type of storm you could have," said Edward J. Paquette, the executive director of the management company that runs Terminal 1 at Kennedy, the terminal used by Royal Air Maroc. "It was freezing rain and sleet that adheres to everything, the flight surfaces, the fuselage, the wings. Its difficult to remove."
Terminal 1, which handles 17 foreign airlines, used 30,000 gallons of de-icing solution on Friday night. Ordinarily, that amount of the liquid, often referred to as glycol, would last half the winter, Mr. Paquette said.
Because the slick, sloppy roads made the going slow, "the folks who deliver the glycol ran behind" and could not keep up, Mr. Paquette said.
The ice also caused problems for the planes and the equipment that attends to them -- baggage and fuel trucks, for example.
"You have difficulty moving just like you would driving a car," Mr. Paquette said. "Everything has to go that much more slowly."
Some planes at Kennedy were de-iced the conventional way, by trucks with hoses that spray the de-icing fluid. But Kennedy also has a de-icing station, a tentlike structure that functions like a jet-size car wash.
The de-icing station can handle seven planes an hour in a snowstorm, said William DeCota, the director of aviation for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but an ice storm increases the time needed to complete the process. Mr. DeCota and passengers on at least one of the stranded flights talked of de-icing times as long as four hours.
Compounding the delays, an Alitalia plane broke down while in the de-icing station. The Alitalia jet had to be towed out, and the wait for a tractor to pull the plane held up other planes waiting to go in for de-icing.
The planes were filled with tense and increasingly angry passengers, none more so than the Air Maroc jet, which was to have taken off at 7:30 p.m. on Friday. but did not leave the ground until 9:40 p.m. yesterday. They spent a restless night and morning of napping, wandering the aisles and eating what would have been their in-flight meal a few feet above the tarmac.
Another passenger, Peter Shinkle, said he had asked to speak with the pilot about midnight. The flight attendants refused, telling him the pilot was busy. At about 6 a.m., he said, "I began raising a fuss again, and I was permitted to go up in the cabin" and talk with the pilot and co-pilot.
"That's when they told me if we got out of line and went back to the gate, it would take three hours just to go back to the gate," he said. "It's hard to believe, but that's what he said."
After all that, the plane headed back to the gate shortly after 10 a.m. Mr. Paquette, the Terminal 1 official, said the crew had "timed out," meaning that they could no longer be at the controls.
Barhoumi Rochdi, an account executive for the airline, said the terminal lacked the manpower and equipment to handle the de-icing in such a severe storm.
Once the passengers finally left the plane, the airline told them they could show their boarding passes for free meals at restaurants. Mr. Rochdi said the airline was flying in a larger plane to accommodate the passengers from the Friday
