Extreme weather is no longer exceptional, and that\u2019s forcing changes at some of the world\u2019s most diligent storm trackers: airlines.<\/p>\n

Weather delays in the U.S. have been trending higher the past four years, upending historical patterns and jumping to an 11-year high for this year\u2019s summer storm season, according to government data for the 30 biggest airports. In June, for example,\u00a0United Airlines Holdings Inc.<\/a>\u2019s Denver hub registered as many disruptive storms as it had for the entire previous summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to anticipate that the summer weather is probably going to be a little more difficult than traditionally\u2014that this is not going to be changing,\u201d\u00a0Delta Air Lines Inc.<\/a>\u00a0Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen a pattern here, certainly in the last couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast-moving summer storms tend to cause more last-minute disruptions because they\u2019re hard to predict. But airlines have also noticed that those events\u2014as well as ice and snowstorms in winter\u2014last longer than in the past, said Jim DeYoung, United\u2019s vice president of network operations, citing conversations at industry gatherings.<\/p>\n

The airline industry\u2019s experience tracks scientific consensus that global warming is affecting the vast systems responsible for nor\u2019easters, blizzards and thunderstorms. Climate change is causing increasingly erratic behavior in the summer jet stream, which may be linked to \u201cremarkable weather extremes\u201d in recent years, said Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center and co-author of a 2018 study on the topic.<\/p>\n

To environmental activists, airlines aren\u2019t just victims of climate change; they\u2019re also perpetrators, as burning jet fuel emits greenhouse gases. But whatever the cause, carriers have been forced to address the effects, as have industries from dairy farming to auto retailing.<\/p>\n

United has overhauled its system to re-accommodate passengers and improved how it routes planes around storms. American Airlines Group Inc. is beefing up staff to handle diverted flights. Delta is throwing out its old assumptions about how bad storms will be. In the winter, carriers cancel flights and move planes and crews to unaffected airports so service can resume quickly once a storm system has passed.<\/p>\n

Severe weather outbreaks from last winter into this summer were \u201ca turning point,\u201d DeYoung said.<\/p>\n

\u201cRather than the storms affecting operations for two or three hours, they seem to last all day,\u201d he said. Chicago-based United is building tools to respond more quickly to thunderstorms that \u201cpop up out of nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

United and other carriers are ensuring that smaller airports that receive diverted planes during storms have the staff and equipment to handle them. United also is providing crews and passengers with more specific details on how weather will affect flights.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur perspective is, climate change is real and we now have to prepare to deal with that reality,\u201d DeYoung said.<\/p>\n

Avoiding Turbulence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond more frequent, longer storms, airlines also have detected more choppy air. Course and altitude changes to avoid turbulence cost U.S. carriers as much as $100 million a year and consume an additional 160 million gallons of fuel, according to a recent study by insurer Allianz SE and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.<\/p>\n

Each minute of delay costs an airline $74.20, according to the trade group Airlines for America. That puts the total tally at more than $1 billion for the roughly 14 million minutes of weather-related flight delays tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration at the 30 biggest U.S. airports for the latest fiscal year.<\/p>\n

Delta no longer can assume that delays will be relatively consistent year-to-year so is re-setting its assumptions annually based on new data. The Atlanta-based carrier also is bringing in more employees, from pilots to tarmac workers, sooner during storms to help offset shortages caused by delays, CEO Bastian said.<\/p>\n

Delta and other airlines are also adding buffer time to their schedules for periods prone to storms so that staffing plans and passenger itineraries don\u2019t have to get changed at the last minute.<\/p>\n

While\u00a0Southwest Airlines Co.<\/a>\u00a0said it hasn\u2019t adjusted operations in response to changing weather trends, it does have new tools to deal with delays. The Dallas-based carrier recently began rolling out an automatic rebooking function for when flights are disrupted and started scanning bags at planes to better track when they are loaded on a new flight because of a cancellation.<\/p>\n

American has begun using more airports to take diverted flights from its Dallas-Fort Worth hub\u2014reducing its reliance on Austin, Texas\u2014and has increased staffing to coordinate diversions. The Fort Worth-based airline also has invested in improved forecasting and is developing an app to help displaced flight crews find hotels faster, said Jon Carlo Gulbranson, American\u2019s vice president of operations and crew performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s predominantly technology and being smarter with our current resources,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extreme weather is no longer exceptional, and that\u2019s forcing changes at some of the world\u2019s most diligent storm trackers: airlines. Weather delays in the U.S. have been trending higher the past four years, upending historical patterns and jumping to an 11-year high for this year\u2019s summer storm season, according to government data for the 30…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,29,61,1,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12463,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12460\/revisions\/12463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}