No quick return to normal for NY airports: officials

NEW YORK: New York area airports will not reopen until at least late Monday, officials said after Hurricane Irene air chaos saw more than 10,000 flights canceled across the eastern United States.

New York area commuters also faced a nightmare start to the week as transport authorities said there would be no quick reversal to Saturday's mass transit shutdown.

John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia and Newark airports all closed Saturday in the face of the oncoming hurricane.

Although the storm moved away Sunday, "service will not be resuming today," said Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the area's airport and port facilities.

Ward said there could be "potential beginnings of service late tomorrow afternoon at best" at the airports and "hopefully" almost normal service on Tuesday.

American airlines, British Airways, Air France and other carriers have already called off many flights to and from Europe and Asia on Monday.

Even though Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday, the New York mass transit system also remained closed, along with train traffic across the northeast United States and many ports.

Mass transit chairman Jay Walder said there had been "widespread impacts" to train equipment from the storm because of flooding, even if the worst case scenario of seawater flooding subway tunnels had not happened.

"The first service that we will be able to restore is the bus system," he said.

However subway trains cannot run until extensive testing and checking is done of every line.

"You're going to have a tough commute in the morning," Walder warned New Yorkers.

Meanwhile, officials at the Port Authority said they are still deliberating over when airports will open.

"I can't even give you a guesstimate," authority spokesman Steve Coleman told AFP.

Flights resumed in the Washington region but remained severely disrupted.

The Federal Aviation Administration said more than 10,000 flights have been canceled from Florida to Massachusetts since Friday because of Irene, with the number of disruptions set to increase.

Tom Hendricks, vice president of the Air Transport Association, an industry body, said airlines "slowly repositioning" jets and crew that were hastily moved away from the storm's path.

He said operations in New York would resume Monday afternoon but added "it will take a couple of days to get the networks back."

Jet Blue chief executive Dave Barger told CNBC television his company's first flight from New York would be at 3:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Monday. The US domestic carrier accounts for more than 10 percent of the canceled flights.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011