Caribbean Airlines (CAL) has managed to get the majority of Carnival lovers, who were stranded at the John F Kennedy International Airport in New York on Friday because of a snowstorm, into T&T in time for today's major Carnival festivities.CAL communications manager Clint Williams said yesterday they had managed to clear the backlog of passengers created after the JFK Airport was closed Friday because of the storm, adding that flights were now back to normal.
Asked how the stranded passengers dealt with the situation, he said: "Many people camped out at the airport to be available for a flight when the airport reopened Saturday morning. A very significant number of the passengers were Carnival visitors. People were very understanding. They knew it was a storm-related delay."
Williams said CAL used a "wet lease" system, involving the hiring of another aircraft with its own crew, to help bring all the passengers to T&T. He said all passengers who had booked flights were taken to and from JFK from Friday up to Saturday night."Using our aircraft and Omni International, a company that hires out its aircraft and crew, we operated to the max to ensure everyone got here in time for the festival," he said.
"We increased the number of aircraft we put into JFK and as soon as we got notification from the airport that it was reopened we were able to bring everything quickly back to schedule."Those who were to arrive yesterday, arrived yesterday." Winter storm Nemo brought as much as three feet of snow to parts of North-east America and killed 14 people.
It also knocked out power and left hundreds of thousands of people in biting cold, stranded drivers on the Long Island Expressway and put major cities on lockdown for an entire weekend. Nemo also brought gale-force winds and coastal flooding, reports stated.While Americans are still reeling from the blizzard, shovelling snow and trying to restore normalcy to their lives, those who came to T&T for Carnival are today dancing to soca in hot sunshine.