Severe winter storm delays and cancels flights in Calgary

Massive east coast storm delays flights Several Calgary flights were delayed due to the storm. Kathy Le has more.

Residents of Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United States are bearing the brunt of a late blast of winter as a strong nor’easter hits the region, but air travel across the country, including here in Calgary, is also affected.

Anyone looking to fly east out of Calgary on Tuesday is likely to be facing huge delays or cancellations because of the weather.

Six U.S. states have declared a state of emergency as up to 60 cm of snow is expected in some regions.

Thousands of flights have been cancelled in the United States already and power has been knocked out to almost 250,000 people from Virginia northward.

According to data about 25 percent of the flights at Toronto’s Pearson Airport have been grounded.

There have been a handful of flight delays and cancellations here at the Calgary but hundreds of passengers have been left stranded.

Many of them are upset because they’d driven a long while to get there and got no notice from WestJet about their flights being cancelled.

Officials with WestJet say they would have been able to inform people about the situation if they had enough time before learning about the cancellation themselves.

But passengers have no choice but to wait now.

“I was supposed to take off at 10:25 this morning. I drove in from Medicine Hat and that’s a three hour drive and now I am stranded here until 10:45 p.m. tonight. I am feeling like I am going to be tired when I arrive in Halifax at 6:00 a.m.,” said Danielle McKinon.

“At first we were supposed to go to JFK and then Montreal and then we did Maui, Calgary and we were supposed to have our flight and 12:30 p.m. but it was cancelled because of the weather. Now we are waiting, we have another flight but it’s going to be 1:30 a.m.,” said Steve Smird.

WestJet, meanwhile, says it is willing to extend some flexibility concerning fee associated with changing or cancelling flights, but haven’t gone so far as to cancel those costs altogether.

There are only a handful of Air Canada flights affected by the weather on Tuesday.