MSP officials offer latest ground stop details

A spokesperson for MSP Airport with the latest of what's happening there. Maury? That's right, yes. Things have been kind of a little crazy here all afternoon, so we thought we'd go straight to the source and talk with Jeff Lee, who's the spokesperson for the MAC. And Jeff, just can you tell us what's the latest and what's happening with this ground stoppage? Well, the notice for the ground stop nationwide happened about 3 o'clock local time. Certainly that's taken a while to have any full impact. And so what we're seeing now is we don't have a resolution. That's been communicated to our airport or elsewhere. That's going to come from the FAA as they try to navigate what is causing this issue. But in the meantime, we're starting to get an increase in cancellations. The ground stop means that no departing flights can take off. Those that were already in the air could continue on to their destination airport or other airports to land. We're also having to manage sort of the flights that are coming in. When you have airlines and aircraft that are remaining at the gate and don't take off, you do not have the gate space for the additional flights that are coming in. And so some of those flights will have to park at various locations on our ramp and on the pavement. We're going to work with the airlines, with air traffic control, with buses, if they get requests to move passengers off any remote. parked aircraft through this evening to get passengers, if there's a request, to the terminal so they can get any accommodations they may need so that airlines can work with them once there's a resolution to this issue. Do you have a ballpark of how many flights have been canceled here at MSP? I do know with the three o'clock, we had about 170 flights that still were on the schedule to depart for the rest of the day. So we know there's that. And then there may be some additional cancellations on the arrival side. Those flights that are What's your advice to travelers first? The travelers who are here at the airport who may be waiting for a flight and may have checked their bags or waiting to get their checked bags back, or people who are on their way to the airport and want to know if they should come here or not? Yeah, it's a good question. For those that are here, the airline representatives at the ticket counters are going to have the latest information about where their bags may be. The airlines are going to have the latest information on what is the status of their flight, whether it's an arriving or departing flight. Certainly, we're going to see more cancellations tonight. This is... It's likely going to ripple into the evening, late evening hours and tomorrow. So anybody that has flights scheduled for later tonight and aren't at the airport or tomorrow or picking up passengers, it's really important to get in contact by website, by phone or whatever means with the particular airline to get the latest flight status because they have the latest information. I do know that we sort of have flight screens and updates there. They're slow to update because that's actually coming from the airlines. So we have an unprecedented event where the airlines are trying to figure out all their operations and as they make their updates, it should slowly come up to our flight boards and also on our website. So that's why we say check with the airlines for the latest information. Are you anticipating that there will be people who are sleeping here at the airport tonight? We certainly have procedures in place for that type of event. It's very likely we could and so we're working with our tenant partners, with our concessionaires just to make sure that if we have the ability to keep our concessions open for people that are going to be staying here tonight that don't have a means to leave the airport and stay overnight, we're going to try to accommodate them the best that we can. How do you handle something like this? Obviously this doesn't happen very often and it only happened a couple of times in the last 25 years. What procedures do you, do you have procedures in place and kind of what do you, Do for situations, you know, contingency plans when something like this happens. There are contingency plans and we are enacting them as we get through this event. And again, it's early on, right, as far as the impact. But we have sleeping mats and we have concessionaires that are going to stay late. And we have staff that are going to be brought in to make sure that we can accommodate as best as we can. We're going to work with our airlines and see what they need and what requests that they make. But we're going to have to wait and see what the full impact is. But we're going to be here in partnership with our airlines. Air traffic control, every airport is kind of going through this right now, and I'm sure everyone's asking for patience on the traveler side, for people that are picking up, and patience for ticket agents that are also waiting on the latest information. Since we've been here, we've noticed things have been relatively calm. There haven't been too many outbursts or anything like that. Have you heard any reports of anything like that, and do passengers seem to be dealing with this or handling this well? I don't have any reports, but I'm sure they can understand the magnitude probably once they hear the context of what's happened, that everyone's in the same boat, if you will. Again, I think there's going to be a lot of patience needed for everybody that's traveling tonight or that are working at airports and trying to help our passengers this evening and tomorrow and days after. Well, just your thoughts about this, again, just dealing with something like this. Well, we're just a few hours in. It happened at 3 o'clock. We're three hours in, and we still have flights that are still inbound that probably were in the air when this happened. So I think we're going to have to wait and see, but I can tell you we've got a full team of staff with the MAC working with our airlines, getting the latest updates with our service providers. And we're talking those that are out on the field that fuel planes, that run our buses, that work below the wing. All trying to help manage and make sure that we can get parking spaces and we can get accommodations for our passengers and the pilots and the crew to the terminal if needed or on their way if we get a quick resolution here this evening. And do you know if any airlines, are they handing out vouchers? Are they allowing people to kind of change flights or do things like that, you know, for passengers? I don't have specific information on what airlines are doing. I do know there's some cancellations that are starting to pick up. But I imagine that they're going to have such a big nationwide event that they're probably going to announce, you know, on their social media channels or their communication channels what they're trying to do for their passengers. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. So that's the latest from MSP right now. and I think I'll send things back to you. All right. Sounds good, Mari. I think one of the key takeaways from Jeff Lee there at the airport is that they're encouraging people. If you've got a departure or an arrival, contact your airline directly. Work with and check online with. Whatever the latest announcements are from those airlines, particularly on departures that may be canceled or delayed, Jeff was saying that the airlines are trying to figure it out right now. They will update their own systems first before those systems communicate with the leaderboards at MSP Airport. Yeah, because the flight boards that, and we've been giving you live pictures of some of those too, so the flight boards that we have been seeing inside of MSP, they only show a couple of cancellations. A couple of delays, which is obviously untrue at this point. So he's saying that those are not being updated because the airlines are controlling those. And so they're just a little slow at this point. Another big thing that he said is he said that they don't have enough gate space at this point for additional flights to come in. So what they will have to do as more people are coming in, they'll have to find some additional space, which would require also potentially some buses to then bring some passengers in need to get inside of the airport and so a lot of pieces right now are being moved which is very interesting as you think about some of those incoming flights because nothing is going out right now. I did a crawl of how many flights we're expecting here yet tonight and there were 142 scheduled arrivals to MSP here this evening. Now what we don't know is what's on the schedule. We do not know how many of those flights were never allowed to take off from their destination before arriving at MSP, but still. There are flights that are arriving right now. Mike Manzoni has been capturing a lot of them as they come in outside of the airport. And they've got a staging area toward the end of the airport where a lot of those planes, his count, at least a half a dozen of those planes there just waiting for a period of 15 minutes to a half an hour before there's some gate space where they can get closer to the terminal to allow those planes to off-board their passengers. And Jeff did say many are still going to come in tonight. And so they are basically adding additional staff, whoever they can add right now. And he was also, Maury also asked a great question about You know, potentially people sleeping in the airport because a lot of people are trying to make their adjustments right now. If you don't live here, maybe in the Twin Cities or in Minnesota in general, you are trying to figure out what you are going to do tonight. If you have children with you, that's another part of it as well. And so people are looking at hotels at this point, but who knows? Some of those hotels could potentially be booked up because everyone is trying to do the same thing. And so when he asked Jeff about sleeping at the airport, he said that they are making accommodations because they do know that that is potentially potentially Something a lot of people are going to be doing tonight. But if you also think about even down to staffing for concessions, for instance, you got a lot of people inside of the airport right now. People need to eat at different times. People are already a little irritated. So when you add hangry on top of that, that's not a great combination. And so he says that they will. Hopefully have enough staff to accommodate everything that they will be dealing with tonight, but not even just tonight. He says this is going to be into tomorrow and potentially the next day because you have to think at this point it's a domino effect for all the airlines. You know, I'm going to say this about MSP, and it's not because we're the hometown customers here, too. You fly around to other airports across the nation, and all of a sudden, the level of service, organization, ease of getting out of MSP Airport. Suddenly becomes painfully obvious what a great asset that we have here with this airport and as a reporter who's attended a number of airports commission meetings over the years, I can tell you there's a level of planning here that's impressive and that level of planning and contingency planning becomes obvious during. Moments like this, when they have to execute a lot of those emergency plans, so there's no doubt in my mind that they're going through a lot of those plans here tonight, even in getting to those vendors and concessionaires saying, we need you to stay open for several more hours tonight as we got more people coming in and the possibility of us having a lot of overnight customers here at the airport.