US airlines getting quick to ground flights

[NEW YORK] There is reason to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first scheduled airplane passenger flight in the United States. That flight was right on schedule. After a week like the last one, things seemed to have gone downhill since.

It wasn't really that much of a flight on Jan 1, 1914, when Tony Jannus flew one passenger, AC Pheil, on a 30 km journey across Florida's Tampa Bay from St Petersburg to Tampa in a wood-and-canvas biplane. The flight was operated by the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, and it arrived, on schedule, about 25 minutes after it took off.

On Thursday through Sunday, airlines cancelled more than 13,600 flights, according to FlightView.com, a site that provides flight information. An additional 4,400 had been cancelled by mid-afternoon on Monday. Among them were 300 JetBlue flights cancelled at the Boston and New York airports. JetBlue said that icy conditions and a recent rule by the Federal Aviation Administration that limits pilots' on-duty hours "caused delayed flights to quickly turn into cancelled ones".