Denver Sets Blizzard Brainstorm

Denver airport authorities and airline officials will gather Wednesday to review whether they could have done anything differently last week, when a blizzard shut down the nation's fifth-busiest airport for 45 hours at the peak of the holiday travel period.

Denver International Airport shut down at 2:45 p.m. MST Wednesday, Dec. 20, and reopened around noon Friday, three days before Christmas. As many as half a million passengers had been expected to use the airport during the three-day period when the airport was shuttered.

Instead, United(UAUA Quote) canceled about 2,000 flights, while Frontier(FRNT Quote) canceled about 650. Both have Denver hubs, United with about 800 daily departures (including 440 mainline departures) and Frontier with about 300 daily departures. In total, about 3,000 flights were canceled by all carriers at Denver during those three days.

Frontier estimated that its cancellations kept 70,000 passengers from making planned Christmas trips. The Denver-based carrier said it undoubtedly lost more than the $5 million in losses it sustained when a March 2003 blizzard closed the airport for a day. United did not provide financial estimates.

Some passengers and others, including aviation consultant Mike Boyd of nearby Evergreen, Colo., have criticized the airport for the length of the closure. "This is a black eye for the airport, and now people will say, 'Don't connect through Denver because it can't handle snow,'" Boyd says.