NEW YORK — Planes were getting up to speed faster than trains and automobiles in the storm-stricken Northeast.
The region’s major airports were all open once New York’s LaGuardia resumed flights Thursday morning. While there were additional canceled flights and the tri-state air space was still relatively empty, flying was closer to normalcy than moving by rail, subway or car.
By midday, about one-third of all scheduled departures from LaGuardia and nearly one-third from Newark, N.J., had been canceled, according to tracking service FlightStats.com. There were 192 canceled departures at LaGuardia, 188 at Newark, and 82 at John F. Kennedy International, or about one in every seven scheduled takeoffs for the whole day and evening.
At Sea-Tac Airport, all departures for the East Coast left or were leaving on schedule Thursday.
That’s nothing compared to earlier in the week, when the airports were virtually ghost towns. Airlines scrapped nearly 8,000 flights on Monday and another 6,500 Tuesday. Thursday’s cancellations were about 1,000, according to FlightStats, bringing the total from Superstorm Sandy to more than 20,000.
There were fewer cancellations at airports outside New York. Reagan National outside Washington had 29 canceled departures; Boston-Logan Airport 26; and Philadelphia 19. There were just five at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and nine at Dulles in Northern Virginia, according to FlightStats.
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