FlightAware's Live Flight Tracker Creates A “Misery Map” Of Flight Delays

Air travel is always hectic when the holidays roll around, but this season has infamously been a genuine nightmare. A massive storm and weather pattern that spanned the United States just before Christmas grounded more than 4,500 flights during the year’s busiest time, and unfortunately, the woes didn’t end there — with tens of thousands more flights canceled in the days following the holiday, too. The nightmare of air travel chaos around one of the busiest travel weeks of the year has continued, and a new map shows which airports are impacted and just how awful the whole situation is.

According to ABC News, the historic scale of cancellations and delays that continued into this week was largely due to Southwest Airlines. And it wasn’t just cancelations: there were 19,000 flight delays on December 28th, with a bulk of those also coming from Southwest Airlines, according to FlightAware.

And as of this writing on December 29th, 2022, 4,103 cancelations and 10,789 delays have already been reported just today.

The FlightAware Misery Map puts the scope of travel snafus into greater perspective.

The interactive Misery Map shows the flight situation at 16 major transportation hubs across the United States. The map tracks how many flights were canceled and delayed and how many are on schedule in numbers, but you also get a quick overview with the red and green colors.

As of mid-afternoon on December 29th, 58% of canceled flights were coming from Southwest Airlines, with the majority of those impacting Denver International airport. We can also see hundreds of flights already delayed or canceled for tomorrow, and those numbers will certainly change throughout today and tomorrow.

FlightAware projects that delays and cancelations will decline through the rest of this week and next as the backlog is worked through and the weather improves. But until then, if you’re planning any air travel, best to check in with the airline for any delay or cancelation notices before heading into the airport... and best of luck to us all.