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U.S. airlines have canceled more than 75,000 domestic flights since Dec. 1, including more than 14,000 this week. That's 5.5 percent of the 1.37 million flights scheduled during that period, according calculations based on information provided by flight tracking site FlightAware.
It's the highest total number and highest percent of cancellations since at least the winter of 1987-1988, when the Department of Transportation first started collecting cancellation data.
The nation's air traffic system was still recovering Friday from the latest bout of bad weather. Flights were taking off again but thousands of passengers weren't.
"This year is off to a brutal start for airlines and travelers," says FlightAware CEO Daniel Baker. "Not only is each storm causing tens of thousands of cancellations, but there's been a lot of them."
And February still has two weeks left.
Mother Nature isn't entirely to blame. A mix of cost-cutting measures and new government regulations has made airlines more likely to cancel flights and leave fliers scrambling to get to their destination.
Comment: There is evidence that these environmental events may be caused by a companion star to the Sun:
"Check out the Wikipedia page on the so-called 'Nemesis' hypothesis. (And see here for additional resources.) It was introduced in 1984 by two teams of astronomers (Whitmire & Jackson, and Davis, Hut & Muller) to explain the periodically spaced extinction events observed in the earth's fossil record. The idea was that a companion sun passing through or close to the spherical Oort cloud would send a death-dealing swarm of comets in earth's direction every 26 million years or so. Its presence may also help explain the non-random trajectories of certain long-period comets, as well as the strange and unexpected elliptical orbit of the recently discovered transneptunian object Sedna."
You can read more here: The Cs Hit List 07: Sun Star Companion, Singing Stones and Smoking Visions