Flights to and from Vancouver International Airport are steadily resuming after severe delays and cancellations due to hazardous winter weather.
The airport itself was fully operational as of Saturday morning, with 93 per cent of scheduled flights at YVR departing, according to Vancouver Airport Authority CEO Tamara Vrooman.
By 10 a.m., 36 flights had been cancelled while 484 were expected to leave as planned.
“We’re at full operation. The runway is bare and wet and ready for Santa, as we say, as we head into Christmas day tomorrow,” Vrooman said.
“Our infrastructure has performed well. Our snow removal and de-icing facilities worked as planned. We have been investing in those over the past several months because we haven’t seen increasing extreme weather events.”
YVR expects around 65,000 travellers to make their way through the airport on Christmas Eve — a number Vrooman calls typical for the holiday season.
As of Saturday afternoon, around a dozen flights had been cancelled and many others were delayed.
On Friday, the airport announced additional “care and comfort” for people stranded at the terminal amid widespread cancellations and delays due to winter weather.
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This included cots, blankets and quiet spaces for people to rest, and 400 hotel rooms for up to four nights for travellers, particularly families and seniors. So far, 145 bookings have been made.
“The hotel community’s been excellent in terms of responding to our calls for rooms right away,” Vrooman said. “The food grocery industry has also been awesome in terms of providing support for food and meals. So, it’s been a real community effort, and we definitely have been impressed by the support we’ve had to date.”
With mass cancellations from WestJet and Air Canada, the airport only saw around 50 per cent of its planned departures take off on Friday, according to Vrooman. WestJet proactively cancelled many flights in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec due to the winter storms.
“This year has been a very unusual year in that we went from almost a standstill at the beginning of the year, due to the pandemic, to traffic increasing over six months by 168 per cent,” Vrooman said.
“This winter, we’ve seen successive winter events. I think what we’re seeing is these winter events are more frequent and more severe when they come.”
A restriction on inbound international flights — put in place following Tuesday’s snowstorm — was lifted Friday morning. However, some flights were running behind Saturday.
“We have had a few delays of international flights,” Vrooman said. “The Singapore Airways flight was delayed this morning. The Air India flight that was cancelled yesterday did depart this morning.”
The cancellations left hundreds of people stranded in the airport, with some passengers sitting on planes on the tarmac for upwards of 12 hours. Vrooman said it was unacceptable to have people wait hours on planes.
— With files from Amy Judd