Earlier this month, travellers arrived at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in southern Florida to catch a 9:15 p.m. flight to Toronto. Judging by a rough average of flight times found online, they could reasonably have expected to arrive sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. the following morning.
In the end, after 10 separate delays and a flight cancelled outright, the plane that would ultimately deliver them to Toronto Pearson International Airport didn’t touch down until around 3 a.m. – the day after that.
“People were losing their minds,” passenger Madison Golshani told CTV News Toronto, reflecting on the 27-hour travel ordeal. “It just felt crazy. It felt unbelievable that this was happening.”
Federal data published this month by Transport Canada found that in a sample week in February, close to 10 per cent of flights across eight airports in Canada’s busiest cities departed more than an hour behind schedule, with just under two per cent of all flights cancelled entirely.
In recent months, stories have circulated online of a passenger whose cancelled flight was offered to be rebooked for two days later, an airline shutdown bringing cascading disruptions to travel plans and a couple who said they were detained abroad after a household product was mistaken for cocaine.
Sound familiar? Have you endured hours of delays, or found yourself stranded thanks to a misunderstanding, cancellation or some other travel mishap? Has chaos erupted before, or even during, a flight you were on?
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With files from CTV News Toronto, Kitchener and Vancouver, and from The Canadian Press.