Another winter storm has canceled or delayed thousands of flights in the United States, with most of the trouble concentrated in Texas but problems could be found on Tuesday across the South.
According to online flight tracking sites, roughly 1,200 flights have been canceled and another 1,600 delayed due to a winter storm stretching from the US-Mexico border to West Virginia.
The system has brought vast amounts of ice, sleet, and freezing rain to the Great Plains and southern Appalachia, paralyzing land travel as well as air. Sleet is rain that has frozen while falling, turning it into tiny ice pellets, while freezing rain falls as liquid rain, but freezes upon contact with colder surfaces, creating a highly dangerous layer of ice on anything it touches.
According to meteorologists, the storm is being strengthened by cold air moving southward from Canada, which will cause a devastating second wave of storms as the air mass moves east from Texas toward the Appalachian Mountains.
The delays come after a month of trouble with US air travel, first caused by another winter storm across the Great Plains late last month, then by a collapse of the country’s flight management software that was initially blamed on foreign saboteurs before being discovered to have been human error by US staff.