Airport Woes
Houston airport grounded by new ranking of worst flight cancellations in U.S.
Houston may be one of the best travel destinations in the country, but chances are you're thinking of skipping H-Town for spring break or summer vacation. Bad news: your flight might not make it out of the airport.
Travel website InsureMyTrip recently gathered data from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which tracks the on-time performance of domestic flights operated by large air carriers, and determined which airports are most likely to experience flight cancellations.
Houston's George Bush Intercontinental places a shameful second, edged out only by New York's LaGuardia Airport.
IAH actually operates the third-most flights total in the top 10 (129,271), but in 2017 a whopping 3,529 of them were canceled. But keep in mind that 2017 was the year of Hurricane Harvey, and the airport was closed due to flooding. According to the Houston Airport System, approximately 74 percent of the year's total canceled flights occurred between August 26 and September 5. When you take that into consideration, only 925 flights the rest of the year were canceled.
That 2.73 percentage is much worse than the 1.03 percent that Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport experienced. Taking the No. 17 spot, DFW canceled 1,868 of its 181,208 flights last year.
The Texas numbers all look pretty large when compared to Salt Lake City International Airport's desirable "last place" finish, however. Of its 111,912 flights, a mere 448 (or 0.4 percent) of them never made it to take-off.