Over 3,000 Christmas Eve and Christmas Day flights cancelled as Omicron spreads

Thousands of would-be travellers received the same troubling message Thursday: a last-minute cancellation of their Christmas flights Friday and Saturday because of the recent spike of omicron cases, including among airline workers.

The number of cancellations globally as of Friday morning added up to more than 3,000, the Flight Aware website showed. It was the latest blow to the holiday season, mainly caused by the new and highly transmissible omicron variant, which now accounts for more than 70% of new coronavirus cases in the United States.

Delta Airlines said it had cancelled about 135 flights for Friday after exhausting “all options and resources,” including rerouting and substituting planes and crews to cover scheduled flights. It attributed the cancellations to “a combination of issues, including but not limited to, potential inclement weather in some areas and the impact of the omicron variant.”

United Airlines cancelled at least 150 flights scheduled to leave dozens of airports Friday — along with 44 more that were supposed to take off Saturday, according to Flight Aware. Other airlines, including JetBlue and Allegiant, did likewise, although American Airlines said Friday morning that it had no flight cancellations.

In Australia, dozens of flights were cancelled at airports in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne as coronavirus cases in the country surged to their highest since the start of the pandemic. And in Europe, a spokeswoman for the Eurostar train service said Friday morning that because of travel restrictions across the continent, a small number of trains had been cancelled amid a drop in demand.

The United States is recording nearly 170,000 new daily cases, a 38% increase over the last two weeks, according to The New York Times’ coronavirus tracker.

United said in a statement that omicron’s “direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation” had led to the cancellations. Crew members have been calling in sick, according to a spokesman, Joshua Freed, who said United had alerted customers as soon as it was able to. And while Freed said he did not expect the airline to cancel more flights, it remained a possibility.

“We are really managing this day by day,” he said. “There may be some more flight cancellations for Saturday. It’s possible.”

In Australia, which has recorded more than 500 omicron cases, many airline staff members are unable to work after being identified as close contacts of positive coronavirus cases, airline officials said. Under government requirements, they are required to isolate for seven days.

“A large number of our front-line team members are being required to test and isolate as close contacts given the increasing number of cases in the general community,” a representative for Jetstar Airways said by email Friday. “As a result, we have had to make some late adjustments to our schedule.”

Staffing shortages across various sectors have been affecting services in many countries as the virus continues to spread.

England said this week that it was reducing the number of days that people must isolate for after showing COVID-19 symptoms to seven days from 10 days, a change that officials said could help alleviate the shortages. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a similar move Thursday, though that change applies only to health workers.