McCarran back to normal after Irene grounds travelers nationwide

Staff and wire reports

Monday, Aug. 29, 2011 | 4:43 p.m.

Irene is gone and East Coast airports have reopened, but it could take several days to get hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded by the storm to their final destinations.

Flight operations have returned to normal at McCarran International Airport, an airport spokesman said, but it wasn’t clear Monday afternoon how many passengers might still be in Las Vegas after missing flights over the weekend.

“It seems as though flight wise, everything is back to normal,” spokesman Chris Jones said.

Earlier in the day some passengers were still in the terminals trying to figure out how to get home, but by a mid-afternoon it appeared that any stuck passengers had either found flights or had gone to hotels for the night, Jones said.

Airports in New York, Boston and Philadelphia bustled Monday after being closed for part or all of the weekend. The week before Labor Day is always a busy one for airlines, so they struggled to cram travelers stranded by Irene onto already-packed planes.

To make matters worse, more than 1,600 flights were cancelled Monday, adding to the nearly 12,000 grounded this weekend, according to flight tracking service FlightAware. The service estimates that 650,000 passengers have been stuck on the ground since Irene hit, but some experts think it's a million or more.

For airlines, restoring service in three major East Coast cities required a lot of scrambling.

When a huge storm hits, airlines don't have full control over when they fly. Airports close, mass transit shuts down, roads get blocked - all creating a situation where the airline might not have any passengers, or might not be able to fly even if the weather at the airport isn't bad yet.

Planes were parked this weekend at airports from California to Orlando. JetBlue had to move more than 50 planes -- a third of its fleet -- away from its home base in New York. Finding extra space for those planes meant dividing them up among more than two dozen airports.

"We had airplanes stacked up like cordwood," JetBlue CEO Dave Barger said in an interview with CNBC.

The storm is expected to cost U.S. airlines $200 million in revenue -- between lost flying and ticket-change fee waivers. Airline officials estimate it will take about two days to get every plane and crew member back in place.

"The next couple of days are going to be trying," said Mike Flores, a US Airways flight attendant and union president. "Once we get to work we're going to be dealing with a lot people who have been up for 24 hours, camped out in airports."