You risk a flight-ning storm if you book a trip on a summer’s night.
Amid peak travel season, taking an evening flight might seem like a great way to avoid crowds and arrive at your destination with the entire next day up your sleeve.
But experts are advising against booking summer night flights, saying they’re the most prone to delays due to inclement weather.
One weatherman recently discovered the fact the hard way, sharing his saga in a TikTok video that has amassed more than 266,000 views.
“I broke the one rule you should never break,” meteorologist Chris Bianchi lamented to viewers in the viral video. “Never book a flight in the afternoon, or especially at night, during the summertime months in the United States.”
Bianchi, who works for 9News Denver, had reportedly booked a flight from New York City to Denver, Colorado on the evening of Jun. 26, only to end up getting stranded at La Guardia Airport overnight waiting for a plane that was delayed for hours due to a thunderstorm.
However, the weatherman says he only has himself to blame.
“I’m a meteorologist, I should know better,” Bianchi said in the footage, which he shot at the airport during the delay. “Chances of there being a thunderstorm somewhere in the United States in the afternoon or the evening are pretty high during the summertime months, during May, June, July, August, September.”
He added:”If you get a thunderstorm in the wrong place and it impacts your flight, you could be completely screwed.”
Why do summer afternoons and evenings create such a “perfect storm” for bad weather? Because the warm temperatures allow the atmosphere to harbor more humidity, which is a prerequisite for building the cumulonimbus clouds that produce thunder and lightning, according to National Geographic.
Thunderstorms are more likely in the evenings than the mornings because it takes a while for the energy to build into a storm, Science Alert reports.
Unfortunately, storms don’t necessarily have to occur at the point of departure or arrival for travelers to experience delays.
“If there’s a thunderstorm in Chicago and you’re flying from New York to Miami, that flight that you’re taking from New York to Miami might be coming from Chicago,” explained Bianchi. “So you should not book a flight during the summertime months [in the evening] because there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have a delay as a result of a backlog of those flights clogging up.”
Many crew members seconded the meteorologist’s advice in the comment section.
“As a former flight attendant I always tell people to wake up and take the first flight out always,” said one. “Weather mechanicals get worse in the afternoon and flight delays cause a domino effect.”
“That rule is 100% correct,” said another. “Coming from an ex-flight attendant. If my schedule had a late flight I knew I was in for hell.”
In order to avert a weather-induced delay, Bianchi advises flyers to download the apps FlightAware and Flightradar24 to track inbound flights.
He also suggested booking a refundable backup flight in case there are storm clouds on the horizon at the flight’s departure point or destination.
