Moira Kwelyuk '10 had planned to return to College Hill Sunday, in time for her Monday seminar. But 24 hours later, she was still waiting in her home state of South Carolina, one of many en route to College Hill who had their Thanksgiving travels disrupted by delayed flights.
"I was supposed to leave on Sunday night at 6:13 p.m.," Kwelyuk said, still in the airport Monday afternoon and having just heard that her flight was yet again delayed. "My bag had gone through, and they announced that the airport was essentially closed for the evening and no other flights would be leaving." She attributed her delay to bad weather in Philadelphia and Chicago, where there was rain and snow.
Kwelyuk said that she tried other avenues, including flights to New York and Boston, but ultimately found that she was "trapped in the state of South Carolina."
"I've been to the airport three times in 24 hours," she said Monday afternoon. "I was here this morning trying to get a flight. ... They basically told me that I wouldn't be able to get a flight until today at 4 p.m."
Patti Goldstein, vice president of public affairs at T.F. Green Airport, said delays across the country were mostly due to poor weather.
Though the airport had no information on the total number of delayed flights, Goldstein said "it wasn't all that many here." She said the issues could be "mostly attributed to other markets in the Midwest and other areas where they had weather conditions."
Goldstein said delays in one region spilled over into the others. "It created a domino effect. If somebody's coming from the West Coast back to Rhode Island and they're connecting through Chicago ... (then) it all depends if those connecting areas have weather conditions."
Rebecca Mazonson '12 was one of numerous students who traveled that path, flying on Southwest Airlines from San Francisco to Providence via Chicago-Midway with Kathryn Tringale '12 and Julia Cabral '12. Mazonson said her flight was supposed to arrive at 11:50 p.m. on Sunday but was delayed almost two hours.
"It actually wasn't very bad," Mazonson said. "I met other Brown students and I sat with friends."
LanShiow Tsai '10 experienced a similar delay on her US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Providence, which she said was pushed from an 8:55 p.m. to a 12:25 a.m. takeoff.
Tsai said getting back to Providence around 1:30 a.m. disrupted her Monday plans. "I had classes from 9 a.m. 'til noon and I didn't go to any of them."
Students weren't the only ones experiencing delays. Associate Professor of Philosophy Nomy Arpaly sent an e-mail to her students Sunday night saying she was "stranded in Ohio" and had canceled class on Monday.
In an e-mail to The Herald Monday evening, Arpaly wrote that her connecting flight was cancelled and she didn't make it back to Providence Sunday at 11 p.m. as planned.
