Storm Causes More Than 400 Flight Cancelations In Chicago

CHICAGO — More than 300 flights have been canceled at O'Hare International Airport and about 100 flights were canceled Wednesday as a winter storm sweeps across the Chicago area. Departures at O’Hare were running about 42 minutes behind on average, while arrivals were running an average of 70 minutes behind.

Both departures and arrivals at Midway were delayed by an average of 15 minutes.

There's a winter weather advisory in effect for most of the Chicago Area until 3 p.m. Wednesday.

According to the website FlightAware, which tracks flight operations, just over 1,600 flights have been canceled within and into or out of the United States on Wednesday.

American Airlines said in a statement that as of 10 a.m. eastern time, American along with its regional partners has canceled 550 flights on Wednesday. The airline said a majority of those cancelations were on smaller, regional aircrafts.

A separate issue has forced Southwest Airlines to cancel a number of flights this week. In a statement, the airline said that following negotiations with a mechanics union on Feb. 12 it experienced an unprecedented number of out-of-service aircrafts in four maintenance locations.

"The number of aircraft out of the fleet has driven cancellations, in some cases extremely long delays and other operational impacts over the last week," the airline said in a statement.

According to USA Today, on Tuesday, the airline canceled 191 flights and delayed 858 flights.

Southwest did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Patch has reached out to Delta and United for comment on how the winter weather is affecting their operations.

Feroze Dhanoa contributed to this report.

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