Thousands of holiday travelers at Logan International Airport faced canceled flights and long delays yesterday, with some trapped in planes on the tarmac for hours, as the third snowstorm in eight days hit Greater Boston.
Like the previous Thursday's 10-inch storm, which plunged Greater Boston streets and highways into gridlock, the slow-falling 6-inch storm seemed to inflict disproportionate chaos yesterday, this time at the airport, where
One Delta flight to Los Angeles was delayed for eight hours - several of them spent on the tarmac as the
"It was just a joke," said an infuriated David Levin, 56, of Chestnut Hill, who was trying to travel to Los Angeles for business. "Every hour they made an announcement that we would be here for another hour, that they didn't have enough information to give us."
Other Delta flights were leaving five or six hours late. Of the 45 departing flights listed as canceled at Logan by 5 p.m., 30 were on Delta, which is just ahead of US Airways and American Airlines in the number of departing flights each day and second to American in passenger volume.
"Boston was tough today," Delta spokeswoman Betsy E. Talton said.
She said the airline had three major problems that fed off each other: Unexplained delays in getting de-icing contractors to spray down jets before takeoff, which prevents potentially deadly ice buildup on aircraft wings; limited gate slots, which restricted Delta's ability to send delayed planes back to the terminal to allow passengers to get off; and crews forced to leave the delayed planes because they had officially "timed out," or hit federal limits on their daily, weekly, or monthly hours of work.
As planes returned to the terminal to drop off crews that had to stop work, that only worsened taxiway congestion and forced de-icing crews to re-treat other planes stuck on the taxiway too long because of the increased ground traffic, creating a further spiral of delays.
"We are looking at opportunities to run additional flights [Friday] to reaccommodate customers," Talton said.
Matthew Brelis, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which oversees Logan, said that by 6 p.m., 93 inbound flights and 68 outbound flights had been canceled at Logan, out of a total daily schedule of about 550 departures and 550 arrivals.
Brelis said Massport as a matter of policy does not comment on specific airlines' operations and could not comment on Delta's service.
The delay of the Delta flight to Los Angeles wasn't nearly as bad as delays faced by travelers on
But several other California-bound flights leaving around the same time as the ill-fated Delta Los Angeles flight managed to make it, after shorter delays. United's morning flight to Los Angeles pushed back at 6:54 a.m., 34 minutes late, and landed in Los Angeles 3 hours and 1 minute late, according to United's website.
Jet Blue's 8 a.m. flight to Long Beach, Calif., left 84 minutes past its 8 a.m. scheduled departure and arrived 2 hours and 25 minutes late, according to JetBlue. The delays in the final arrival times probably include time spent on the tarmac in Boston before takeoff, but how much could not be determined last night.
While other airlines - including America, US Airways, and Continental - were reporting scattered one- and two-hour delays, Delta's timetable out of Boston fell apart.
Alice Saunders of Yarmouth brought her 80-year-old sister, Mary Moran, to Logan for an 8:15 a.m. flight to Norfolk, Va. By 4 p.m., Delta's flight board at Terminal A said the plane had left the gate at 2:15 p.m., six hours late, but Saunders was waiting at the terminal just to be certain it had taken off.
"I want to make sure that it's up; they could still cancel it," she said.
Linda Graham of Charleston, S.C., visiting Boston for a professional training session, had her 11 a.m. flight to South Carolina canceled and by late afternoon still didn't know whether she had a chance of getting back today and was worrying about having her Christmas celebration ruined.
"I want to be back home," she said.
Sameer Kamal, an environmental engineering graduate student at the MIT, had the Delta leg of his two-flight trip home to Houston canceled and was planning to sleep overnight at Terminal A to maximize his chances of getting on a flight today.
"I just got done with exams," Kamal said. "I'm pretty tired, but I've got a book to read."
On area roadways, the generally low-intensity storm caused slow travel from the morning rush into midafternoon, but nothing like the hourslong gridlock last Thursday, according to reports throughout the day from SmartRoute Systems, which provides traffic reports for the state's 511 telephone transportation line.
State Police said they had no reports of people injured in car spinouts. The Massachusetts Highway Department deployed 1,600 pieces of equipment to plow, sand, and salt, about two-fifths as many as last Thursday's storm. About 1,200 of those worked roads in the Boston-North Shore-Lowell area, where snowfall was heaviest, officials said.
Boston had 324 plows and trucks clearing city streets, said Dorothy Joyce, spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
After last week's problems, when some schoolchildren didn't get home until as late as 11 p.m., school officials made a one-time policy change yesterday to allow anxious parents to take their children home from school early, even though city schools were sticking to regular dismissal times, Joyce said.
Frank A. Tramontozzi, chief engineer for MassHighway, said that unlike last week's storm - which brought whiteout conditions just as thousands of motorists were hitting the road, clogging roads and preventing plows from working - yesterday's snowfall was slower and spread out over the workday.
"There was no mass exodus from the city" to jam up plowing operations, Tramontozzi said.
"We were ahead of the storm, and we stayed ahead of it."
Martin Finucane of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent Emily Canal contributed to this report. Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
