Airplanes don't fly well - or at all - when ice falls from the sky.
That turned what was expected to be a day of flights slowed by a rain-and-snow mixture into one with hundreds of flight cancellations at Philadelphia International Airport yesterday.
"It's pretty ugly," Mark Gale, the airport's deputy director of operations, said at mid-afternoon. "Ice and sleet adhere so quickly that many airlines decide, once they make their weather observations, to stop planes."
But passengers, some stuck on planes for hours, did not immediately report horror stories such as those experienced by JetBlue customers at Kennedy International on Valentine's Day.
Airlines here juggled the use of their airport gates to make sure that planes full of travelers that had left gates but could not take off were able to return to the terminal, Gale said.
Still, some passengers spent more than four hours strapped into airplane seats, idling on the taxiways waiting patiently for takeoff clearances that would never come.
Hundreds of flights were canceled yesterday not only at Philadelphia International but also at airports in the New York area.
Joe and Jill Lifrak, of Rehoboth, Mass., started the day at the Providence, R.I., airport, en route with their three young sons to St. Martin for a Caribbean vacation. Their US Airways flight left Providence an hour late - and yet that was the best their luck would be all day.
When they arrived at Philadelphia International, the airline told them their St. Martin flight was still scheduled to leave on time, at 9:38 a.m. Already late, Joe Lifrak hoofed it to the gate to say that the rest of the family - Jill; Joe Jr., 7; Jacob, 5; and Jackson, 3 - were en route.
They boarded the packed plane, listened to the preflight instructions and watched as the pilot steered them toward the runway. Then they waited more than four hours, stuck in a line of jets that was going nowhere slowly, before US Airways said it was canceling their flight. It was already midafternoon, so they stopped at a concourse food court to get lunch, still uncertain of their backup plans.
"There's at least a three-hour wait in line to reschedule our tickets," Jill Lifrak said.
Across its system, the weather forced US Airways to cancel 20 percent of its large jet flights and almost a third of its Express commuter flights, said spokeswoman Andrea Rader.
At Philadelphia, US Airways, Southwest, Delta and other airlines canceled about a third of all flights, according to the FlightStats Web site.
