Heavy rain, hail and flooding swept across the Colorado Front Range on Friday, prompting federal aviation officials to order a ground stop at Denver International Airport that delayed or canceled more than 700 flights. The Federal Aviation Administration halted arrivals at 3:25 p.m. as severe thunderstorms rolled through the Denver metro area and Castle Rock, grounding planes at their origin airports rather than letting them circle overhead.
By the end of the day, FlightAware was tracking 689 delayed flights and 22 cancellations at DEN, according to The Denver Post. Weather-related delays averaged one hour and 44 minutes across the airport, a bruising stretch for travelers already dealing with a wave of monsoon storms that has repeatedly hammered Front Range flight schedules this summer.
United Airlines, which operates its second-largest hub at DEN, bore the brunt of the disruption with 216 delayed flights and four cancellations. Southwest Airlines logged 249 delays and three cancellations, while SkyWest recorded 157 delays and 10 cancellations. Frontier Airlines canceled eight flights amid the ground stop, per the same FlightAware data cited in the Post’s report.
A Second Ground Delay in Three Days
Friday’s ground stop wasn’t an isolated event. Just two days earlier, on August 12, developing monsoon storms over the Denver area had already forced the FAA to issue a nationwide ground delay program for DEN-bound flights, pushing average arrival delays to 144 minutes, according to CBS Colorado. Together, the two incidents mark the second major FAA air-traffic disruption at DEN within roughly 48 hours…