Sandy's effect on travel goes beyond East Coast

• Flight delays, cancellations can last for days
• Storm could have $606 million effect on business travel, $100 million for airlines
• Travelers urged to change travel dates

As airlines canceled thousands of flights in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy striking the East Coast, analysts say they avoided stranding as many passengers, planes and crews at airports as usual during a big storm.

But recovery efforts are expected to take days, and up to a week to restore regular airline traffic, as the storm surge expected Tuesday in the New York area threatened to flood parts of JFK and LaGuardia airports.

Airlines canceled 8,962 flights through Monday morning – with more expected – and two dozen airports have all but closed from Washington to Boston.

"Recovery is going to be a long-term deal, probably lasting throughout the week, given the number of displaced passengers," says Chris Oswald, vice president for safety for the industry group Airports Council International-North America, whose Sunday night flight to Washington from Johannesburg was canceled because of the storm.

Flight cancellations ripple across the country during a storm because airlines depend on planes and flight crews to handle multiple flights each day.

Because so many flights flow through the New York region each day, the storm threatened not only direct flights but any planes and crews passing through airports with massive cancellations, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington's Dulles and Reagan.

For example, 81 departures and 84 arrivals were canceled at Los Angeles on Monday, representing 10% of the typical daily flights, according to the FlightAware tracking system. Only 52 Los Angeles flights were canceled Sunday and 62 on Tuesday, but that number could rise as airlines determine when they can resume full operations on the East Coast again, says Mark Duell of FlightAware.

"It's not so much what's happening in the next couple of days when all these flights are canceled," says Robert Herbst, a former airline pilot who became an independent consultant as founder of AirlineFinancials.com. "Then comes the nightmare of trying to reposition all the flight crews and all the aircraft where they originally need to be for a schedule that is set up weeks in advance."

The storm could thwart $606 million in business-related travel, according to a November 2011 study by the Global Business Travel Association. But that study projected a hurricane skirting the east coast, while Sandy is both larger and lasting longer than the one studied.

"I actually think our analysis from last year was a conservative estimate," says Joe Bates, vice president of Global Business Travel Association. "This is the hub of business travel activity in the United States. It's going to have a ripple effect across the United States."

Herbst, the airline consultant, estimates the storm could cost airlines several hundred million in lost revenue and more than $100 million in expenses they won't be able to write off.

The Federal Aviation Administration began holding calls Wednesday with airlines, airports and others to plan for the storm. To reduce disruptions, airlines, led by United, began canceling flights over the weekend, which allowed them to keep planes and crews out of harm's way.

George Hobica, founder of Airfarewatchdog.com, says his own flight Monday from New York to Los Angeles was canceled on Saturday, even though he could look out the window Monday morning to see no rain and no breeze.

"In this case, a lot of airlines kept their planes out of New York or they moved them out of New York," Hobica says. "In that sense, I think it's going to be less disruptive than it has been in past years."

Victoria Day, a spokeswoman for the industry group Airlines for America, says reducing the schedules enabled carriers "to recover more quickly when it is safe to resume operations." With airlines waiving change fees, she suggests passengers consider changing travel dates to avoid the storm.

After the storm passes, airlines must move planes back to the New York region from other airports such as in Pittsburgh or Charlotte.

"What they'll end up having to do is ferry these aircraft and flight crews with no revenue on board," Herbst says. "It's a huge impact."

Oswald, of the airports council, says officials are keeping an eye on how much water the storm will push onto low-lying airports such as JFK and LaGuardia and "do some significant damage to the system." Subways in New York and Washington closed in anticipation of flooding, which could also hinder workers from returning to those airports to clean up.

"The surge is something that we're all really, really worried about," Oswald says. "It could take an extended couple of days to deal with, for the water to disperse and to clear debris, to get the airfields up to conditions."