Originally Posted by Jish

I spent 13 hours at DFW yesterday - basically total pandemonium.

I can give you my experience and you can extrapolate. I was scheduled on the 11:50am flight to JFK Sunday. This is after a horrific day of weather on Saturday where tornado sirens went off and we were taken into the backroom of the bar we were at for 30 minutes because there was no glass windows to shatter :|

Anyway - that flight (AA 1345) boarded about an hour late and we taxi'd out and were told we were 17th in line for take off. It had been raining most of the morning as well, sometimes quite bad, but very off and on. About 10 minutes into that line-up our captain "timed out" and we went back to the gate. We sat on the plane for about an hour with a promise of a new crew until they finally gave up and let us off.

Walking through the airport it was clear things were bad and getting worse, other flights to NY airports were either severely delayed or already cancelled. I basically had to beg to get a seat assignment on the 4:40pm to LGA and I was probably the last one. Every gate line was at least 20 people deep and I went to three AC lounges and they each had similar lines. Heard one guy in the A AC say he had been trying to get out 3 days and waited 3 hours in the AC line.

The people waiting in the official "re-booking" lines were worse off - I have never seen anything like it, probably 300 people stretching several gate lengths. Anyway, the 4:40pm flight to LGA kept getting delayed, they were trying to find us a crew because I assume our original crew wasn't able to make it in. They predicted a crew would get there at around 6pm but then that crew was diverted.

At that point I was ready to just book the next day but when I finally got through to AA (I kept getting call backs all night - waits as long as 3 hours) literally no seats were available to NY area for all day Monday. I booked a separate ticket on my phone for Tuesday morning as a backup in a panic.

To wrap it up - two more evening flights were cancelled to NY and those people probably won't be getting out till Wednesday at this point. My flight finally took off (AA 1156) after 11pm and landed at LGA at 3:10am (6+ hours late)