After a week of massive travel headaches mostly at the hands of Southwest Airlines, holiday air travel is finally recovering in the new year.
According to FlightAware, a website that tracks flights in real-time, there were 361 cancellations and 5,554 delays into or out of the U.S. on Sunday.
That's an improvement from the previous week where there were thousands of cancellations each day.
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Most of the cancellations during the week of Dec. 25 were due to the issues Southwest Airlines was facing.
Travelers at San Diego International Airport described one of those flights, JetBlue’s flight 619 which encountered a bird strike on the way to San Diego from Boston’s Logan International Airport.
“I didn’t expect what happened to happen. I was expecting a normal delay, not for the plane to hit a bird,” Justin Hines said.
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According to FlightAware, the original flight was in the air for 44 minutes before returning to Boston’s Logan Airport.
Approximately 2 million people have passed through security checkpoints each day during the week of Dec. 25, according to security checkpoint numbers.
This pace of air travel is expected to continue for a few days into 2023.
