More than 6,000 flights were canceled across the country Friday as the East Coast is slammed with snow.
Dozens of those flights were meant to take off from Cleveland-Hopkins Airport and head to Philadelphia, Newark, New York City, Nasvhille or Charlotte, but were quickly canceled.
Friday evening, all was quiet and clear at Hopkins -- a much different picture than the blizzard out east.
But interim airport director Fred Szabo said if and when that heavy snowfall hits Northeast Ohio, the airport is ready -- this time.
Last year, the FAA slapped Hopkins with $735,000 in penalties, accusing officials of understaffing and being unprepared during snowstorms, resulting in flight delays and diversions. After disputing the claimsand a final meeting in December with FAA officials in Washington, D.C., Szabo said a decision on whether Hopkins will have to pay that fine is just weeks away.
With a new Snow and Ice Plan for 2016 in place, Szabo said they've already taken steps to make sure that doesn't happen.
"This year, we haven't had any issues of planes diverted or planes not able to gain traction. Those were the issues a year or two ago," he said. "But we never operated the airport in an unsafe manner -- that's an important point to make."
The biggest change in the new plan is that Hopkins, for the first time in a while, is fully staffed with 117 workers.
For the last several years, records show only about two-thirds of the workers budgeted for were hired.
The other big change, Szabo said, is that the airport isn't going off predictions from the National Weather Service to call workers in like they used to.
"Anyone who lives in Northeast Ohio realizes predictions are not always exact," he said.
So now, Szabo said the hint of any snow at all -- even a 1 percent change -- triggers bringing in a minimum number of workers and staffing up as the snow increases.
"That way, we'll never get in a situation where we get caught with a storm and not have enough people to deal with it," Szabo said.
But it hasn't been all smooth sailing this year.
On Sunday, Szabo said they dealt with an "incursion," meaning a worker drove on to an active runway with snow plows he was leading following behind -- right underneath a Spirit Airlines plane that was taking off.
There were no injuries, but the worker has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation into exactly what -- and why -- it happens is underway. Szabo said an incursion hasn't happened in the last two years.
The FAA is also investigating.
