It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.
The winter storm today is causing flight delays and cancellations at the Springfield-Branson National Airport. Michele Skalicky reports.
Airlines took advantage of the lull in the freezing precipitation today to get flights off the ground at the Springfield-Branson National Airport.
Flight delays this morning meant five to six hour waits for some passengers. Kent Boyd is spokesman for the airport.
"For most of the morning, I would say the vast majority of the flights that were supposed to leave didn't because there was so much ice gathering on the airplane, they couldn't get it off. They could get it off for awhile with the de-icing fluid, but by the time they got out there on the runway, they were iced up again, so they had to come back to the terminal, so not a good situation with the weather today."
Boyd says if you're planning to meet someone at the airport or if you're booked on a flight out of Springfield today, you should check with your airline and check often before heading out.
"Here at the airport, it's hard for airport administration to tell what's going on with the airlines, and sometimes the airlines themselves don't know what's going on from one minute to the next. They might get a plane de-iced and they might be ready to take off and then they find out that they don't have a slot to fly into, say in Chicago. And what I mean by that is that the airlines have to have a hole in their schedule for an airplane to leave here to go to another airport, and in weather like this what they have to do is try to time the de-icing of the airplane with the availability of the slot, and sometimes the two don't mesh and then the flight ends up being cancelled or delayed."
Boyd says the status of a flight today can change from one minute to the next.
