(REASON) — The weather in New York City was sunny and humid when JetBlue informed me via a terse email Tuesday morning that my Wednesday afternoon flight back home from California had been unceremoniously nuked.
“We’ve made some changes to our schedule resulting in the cancellation of your upcoming flight,” Customer Experience Operations Director Kate Hart wrote.
Puzzled, I made a rare vacation toe-dip into the horrors of Google News and saw through Gothamist that “NYC airports cancel, delay hundreds of flights during third day of storms.”
“Thunderstorms?!” my wife texted back. “They’ve been telling us about storms for 5 days now and when it rains, it barely rains.” I looked at the weather forecast, and sure enough, it showed “partly cloudy” in New York for most of the next 48 hours, with a five-hour window on Wednesday between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. during which there would be a chance of thunderstorms between 33 percent and 49 percent. My flight had been scheduled to arrive in Newark just before 10 p.m.