Flight cancelations on the rise as 4th of July weekend approaches

Thousands of scheduled flights are being canceled in the U.S. ahead of the upcoming July 4th holiday weekend, with delays are expected to worsen.

East Coast airports appear to have the sharpest increases in delays and cancellations due to storms.

The Federal Aviation Administration has already this week halted flights bound for the LaGuardia airport, in New York; Reagan Washington National, in Washington, D.C., and the Baltimore-Washington airport.

United Airlines canceled 18% of its scheduled flights Tuesday, and JetBlue canceled 16% of its flights.

“All these poor people are literally just sitting there at the mercy of a company who is not doing anything to help them,” said traveler Margo Osborne after her United Airlines flight from Newark got canceled. “There is zero customer service right now.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has already been critical of airlines for over a year, accusing them of scheduling more flights than they can handle and not meeting reasonable standards of customer service.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby blamed a lack of federal air traffic controllers for delays at its Newark hub last weekend.

“We estimate that over 150,000 customers on United alone were impacted this weekend because of FAA staffing issues and their ability to manage traffic,” Kirby told employees in a memo Tuesday night.

The FAA acknowledged that key facilities including one in the New York City region are understaffed. The agency is training about 3,000 new air traffic controllers, but most will not finish their training anytime soon, according to The Hill . 

The Transportation Department’s inspector general said in a report last week that the FAA only made “limited efforts” to sufficiently staff critical air traffic control centers and doesn’t have a plan to tackle the problem.