WASHINGTON — Early Tuesday, in the wake of the region’s first major snowstorm, Reagan National Airport was full of passengers — none of them going anywhere fast.
At about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, WTOP’s Rahul Bali said, no planes were coming or going, but plenty of passengers were still waiting in the cab line.
Usually, cabs come instantaneously, Bali says, but Tuesday they were coming only every 10 or 15 minutes. The man at the front of the cab line told Bali that he’d been there an hour.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of time to share what Bali called “real horror stories.”
One man hoping to fly from Florida to Hartford has been there for 11 hours. “The first flight was delayed about eight hours before they finally canceled it,” he told Bali. Told there were no more flights to Hartford, he booked a flight to Boston and rented a car to drive to Hartford. “Waited for that one for another four hours, then I got to the tarmac and they canceled the flight.”
Hannah, flying to San Francisco through D.C., spent five hours on the plane. “They did try to pass out some water and biscotti,” Hannah said. While she was telling Bali that she hadn’t eaten since 2 p.m., someone else in line gave her a bag of snack mix, which she “scarfed down,” Bali says.
Bali added that he saw planes being towed from gates, and reinforces the usual advice for people who have flights for Tuesday: Check whether your flight is still on — and just before leaving for the airport, check again. Check your airline’s rebooking policy, too.
In bad weather, Bali says, “[airlines] won’t let their planes get stuck in a city — they may not even be there.”
