Southwest cancellation upends Brightwaters friends' getaway

Megan Van Valen’s Nashville, Tennessee, getaway for Columbus Day weekend had originally been booked on Spirit Airlines, which this summer had a travel meltdown — thousands of flight cancellations.

"Funny thing," said Van Valen, who is traveling with her husband and two other couples from Brightwaters. "We originally had a Spirit flight but canceled it and booked Southwest. We were nervous about all of the cancellations."

Then, just as the couples were preparing to fly back to Long Island on Monday, an alarming message popped up on one of the other wives’ Android phone, nine minutes before midnight Sunday: Their Flight 442 was one of more than 1,000 Southwest Airlines cancellations across the United States this past weekend. So instead of flying from Nashville International Airport to Long Island MacArthur Airport and arriving back on the Island at 2:35 p.m. Monday as planned, in time for Van Valen’s jury duty Tuesday in Riverhead, the couples were stuck.

"We all started panicking trying to get a new flight. We were anxious to get back to our families and had it planned perfectly to get home in time to get ready for back to school and work on Tuesday," said Van Valen, 37. "It was a long night trying to figure it out and we didn’t want to go to bed without a plan to get home."

Van Valen and her friends were among thousands of passengers delayed over the long holiday weekend following travel disruptions that the carrier blamed on air-traffic control problems and bad weather. The company has denied reports of a sickout to protest the airline's mandate that personnel be vaccinated against COVID-19.

On Long Island, Flight 442 wasn’t the only one of Southwest’s to be canceled over the weekend. On Sunday, eight of the carrier’s flights were canceled, both arrivals and departures, according to Shelley LaRose Arken, aviation commissioner for the Town of Islip, which runs MacArthur Airport. On Monday, two more flights were canceled, an arrival and a departure, she said.

The Ronkonkoma airport, whose carriers include American Airlines and Frontier Airlines, ordinarily has seven or eight daily departures via Southwest, with essentially an equal number of arrivals. Overall, there are 17 or 19 daily departures on average of all carriers.

The cancellations were a sour note for a trip Van Valen described in a text message as "The best!!" — the Cheekwood botanical gardens, the Twelve Thirty Club, brunch spots, Nashville's trendy Gulch neighborhood, a golf-cart tour of breweries, Miranda Lambert's Casa Rosa bar and restaurant, and more.

The couples stayed up all night and managed to find an early flight back.

They will be flying — departing at 6 a.m. Tuesday via Detroit, not direct as initially booked — into Queens' LaGuardia Airport.

Van Valen emailed the court to say she would be missing jury duty.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.