Morning Fog Trips Up Travelers at National Airport

A 1 1/2 -hour flight delay isn't too bad around the holidays -- unless your checked luggage includes two ice chests full of fresh fish.

"I'll be cooking right when I get there," said Rosemary Furfaro, 55, of Alexandria, who was headed to her brother's home in Greensboro, N.C., but was held up at Reagan National Airport because of bad weather.

It was slow going for many travelers in the Washington area yesterday, with flights delayed or canceled on one of the busiest travel days of the year. A thick blanket of fog had settled in, grounding flights, slowing traffic on roads and, at one point, lowering visibility to an eighth of a mile, authorities said.

Compared with the Midwest and Northeast, where hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled because of wind and snow, the impact of the fog on local travelers was not dramatic, officials said.

"Sunday morning travel is usually a lighter travel day, so they were able to catch up pretty easily," said Courtney Prebich, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.

Flight delays at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and Dulles International Airport were minor, authorities said. But at National, flights were grounded for more than three hours.

Diarra McKinney, 30, snacked on potato chips while he waited there for a relative to pick him up, three hours after he was supposed to be headed to the Bahamas to spend Christmas with his girlfriend and her family.

His 10 a.m. flight was canceled, he said. He was rebooked for a flight today.

"Last year, the same exact thing happened. I lost two days of my vacation," said McKinney, a Washington native and Harvard Business School student.

Anita Jones, 62, of Reston sat reading as she waited for her son, his wife and their 7-year-old daughter to arrive from Boston, about two hours later than their scheduled noon arrival. Their presence for Christmas is a rare treat, she said.

"I'm really impatient to see my granddaughter," she said, smiling broadly. "It's been something like three years since I was with her for Christmas."

Rhonda Ritzel's 8:30 a.m. flight "was supposedly delayed, canceled, rescheduled, et cetera, et cetera," she said, adding skeptically, "I'm now on the 3:30 flight, apparently."