- Two Delta Air Lines flights took around twice as long as usual on Saturday.
- They took unusual routes to avoid large areas of bad weather.
- Powerful storms across the South and Midwest killed at least 40 people this weekend.
Passengers endured a pair of flights that were twice as long as expected due to bad weather on Saturday.
Delta Air Lines Flight 2778 was traveling from Memphis to Atlanta on Saturday.
The journey usually takes under an hour, and sometimes as little as 45 minutes. But this time, it took an hour and 39 minutes.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the Boeing 717 took an unusual route to avoid a large patch of severe weather.
Instead of flying directly southeast, it went south over Louisiana before turning back northeast around the bad weather.
A flight from Atlanta to Memphis earlier in the day took a similar diversion, also nearly doubling its flight time.
In a video shared on Instagram, a Delta captain also spoke about how he had dealt with the bad weather.
Kenny Card was about to pilot an Airbus A321 from Denver to Atlanta but noticed he may need to divert around "a line of thunderstorms."
"We'll look at it in real time and make the safest course possible," he said in the video.
Pointing to red areas on the satellite map, Card said it was "convective activity."
This refers to air moving upward — which can cause thunderstorms. For pilots and passengers, convection can also cause severe turbulence.
If a plane flies through turbulence, it tries to align itself with the changing airflow, so its motion becomes erratic.
"It's essentially like taking a box with something in it and starting to shake the box up and down," Guy Gratton, an associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University, previously told Business Insider.
"Passengers are told to keep their seatbelts done up because if you're tied to the box, you're much less likely to get injured," he added.
Powerful storms moved across the South and Midwest this weekend. NBC News reported that 40 people were known to have died as of Monday morning. Hundreds of thousands of people were also temporarily left without power.
