• Scores of JetBlue passengers on no less than a dozen planes had been stranded on the tarmac at JFK airport on Sunday.
• Irate passengers took to social media to doc their hours of being trapped on grounded flights.
• Some described being caught onboard their planes for 13 hours, with “no readability” being given by airline workers.

Passengers flying into John F. Kennedy Worldwide Airport on JetBlue planes discovered themselves stranded on the airport’s tarmac on Sunday, ready for hours earlier than being allowed to disembark.

Indicators of bother started to brew earlier within the night, with flight path maps exhibiting at least a dozen JetBlue planes grounded on the tarmac at JFK. 

FlightRadar; Levi butcher

Insider spoke to a number of passengers caught on the planes who described being stranded on the plane for hours.

Musician Hannah Eggen, who stated she was trapped on her airplane for 13 hours, instructed Insider she was given a number of causes as to why her flight was not shifting nor permitting passengers to disembark. 

“They delayed the flights a number of totally different instances for various causes, then instructed us it was canceled with no rationalization or compensation. After which they only booted us out of the terminal. There are households and aged folks right here who do not know what to do,” Eggen stated.

Eggen added that she was given 5 totally different explanations by airline workers as to what was taking place, together with inclement climate, and the runways being slippery. 

She added that when she was lastly allowed to deplane, there was nonetheless “no readability” and “no help” from airline workers. 

In an electronic mail to Insider, JetBlue disputed some accounts, saying that they “had no flights go over DOT tarmac delay limits,” which is three hours for home flights.

In the meantime, Levi Butcher, a passenger on Flight B6 524 from Los Angeles to New York, instructed Insider he was caught on the airplane for simply over an hour and a half. 

“We landed round 9.20 p.m. and taxied round for about quarter-hour after which stopped. The pilot introduced that there weren’t any accessible gates, that it may very well be 45 to 60 minutes,” Butcher stated.

Butcher added that whereas ready on the tarmac, he noticed no less than three different JetBlue planes lined up close to the plane he was in. Whereas ready, the passengers on Butcher’s flight had been instructed there was no gate bridge operator accessible they usually must look ahead to one to be freed up earlier than attending to disembark. 

“The one rationalization was that they did not have sufficient gates. The pilot remarked over the PA that they need to have simply held us at LAX with the concept a gate could be accessible upon arrival,” Butcher instructed Insider. “We sat on the taxiway ready for a gate for over an hour earlier than we moved to the gate, the place we had been caught once more.” 

Additionally trapped at JFK was Fox 5 NYC morning anchor Bianca Peters, who posted a video on Twitter of herself inside the plane. In a separate tweet, Peters talked about that one passenger on her flight was “having an apparent

panic attack

” after over three hours caught on the airplane. 

“Simply obtained an replace from the captain who says they’re “brief staffed”.. will seemingly be held up on this tarmac for about 3 hours. Can a woman get a refund?! Or no less than some cheese & crackers,” Peters tweeted. 

Different passengers at JFK appeared to have been trapped for various quantities of time. One passenger, Laura Mardkha, tweeted about being caught on the tarmac for 2 and a half hours with “many screaming youngsters” and “no timeline” on after they might disembark. Different Twitter customers additionally posted about having their flights diverted to land in Newark, as a substitute of JFK. 

When reached for remark, representatives from JetBlue instructed Insider that the heavy snowfall over the north-east slowed their operations at JFK.

“After this weekend’s heavy snow and freezing temperatures within the northeast, we’re centered on safely resuming our flight schedule. We’ve got made good progress in ramping up operations in Boston, LaGuardia and Newark,” stated the JetBlue consultant.

“At JFK, we began operations on Saturday as deliberate however confronted quite a lot of situations which have slowed the operation down,” the JetBlue consultant stated, including that the corporate usually takes just a few days to totally get better when a storm of this measurement considerably impacts its two largest markets, New York and Boston. 

“We’ve got mixed some flights at present to ease these constraints and are working to rebook prospects,” the consultant stated. “We apologize to our prospects for the inconvenience and we’re working to get them on their method as shortly as doable.”