ATLANTA — Editor's note: The video above is an earlier report on airline cancellations.
Delta Air Lines said its operations continue to be complicated by COVID, forcing the carrier to cancel more flights Monday.
Flight tracking website FlightAware said the Atlanta-based carrier canceled 81 routes on Monday, the website listed another 515 flights as delayed.
In a news release, a Delta spokesperson said the airline expected to cancel upwards of 200 flights Monday after canceling 374 flights the day before.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport listings revealed at least seven Delta flights were canceled. However, approximately 189 flights were experiencing delays, according to FlightAware.
"It’s awful, just everywhere is backed up, you can’t go anywhere, you can’t do anything and it’s totally not easy getting through the airport," Kim Depass said.
Depass was expected to land in Atlanta from New York within two hours, but she said the trip took twice as long because of lines and delays.
"Just everywhere is super backed up," she said. "TSA took almost 45 minutes to an hour then the flight was delayed about 30 minutes, then we did not take off for another 20 minutes.”
Anyla Jenkins helps wheelchair passengers at Hartsfield-Jackson and said she has never seen special assistance lines get this long. She said she noticed a lot of elderly people traveling to see their families for the first time since the pandemic started, noting that as lines got longer, tempers got shorter.
"We had some up and down attitudes and mood swings and stuff," she said.
The trend in cancelations comes after Delta, among other major carriers, were forced to call off flights ahead of Christmas, citing winter weather concerns and worker shortages attributed to coronavirus.
On Monday, Delta also attributed the myriad of delays and cancellations to winter weather in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Seattle and Salt Lake City, Utah.
"We apologize to customers for the delay in their travel plans. Delta people are continuing to work together around the clock to reroute and substitute aircraft and crews to get customers where they need to be as quickly and safely as possible," a statement from the airline said.