HURRICANE SANDY is set to take a big chunk out of many airlines' earnings this year, according to analysts and the airlines themselves. The storm caused the cancellation of around 20,000 flights and could drive some people in affected areas to defer or cancel November travel in order to rebuild.

Now the Associated Press reports that airlines are carrying extra fuel when they fly into the New York region in order to ensure they have enough to leave the area without filling up—an effort to prevent further cancellations. Flying in the extra fuel costs a decent chunk of money, but not as much as cancelling more flights. The New York City market is a big moneymaker for many airlines, which depend on business and other premium travellers to meet their bottom lines. So cancelling 20,000 flights is going to hurt—to the tune of a $20m hit to net income for Delta Air Lines, the world's largest carrier. The Dallas Morning News' aviation blog has a great round-up of other storm-related damage to the airline industry:

1. Deutsche Bank Securities analyst Michael Linenberg surveyed the field after Hurricane Sandy, and made a projection on the storm’s impact on airline earnings:

“We’ve seen reports that as many as 20,000 flights have been cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. With Hurricane Irene a year ago, the cancellations were roughly 13,000 and the pretax impact to the US airline industry was about $100 million.

“Given that Irene occurred during late August, a busier travel period than late October, it would seem that the impact of Sandy to the US airline industry would be a little less than $200 million pretax.”

2. Wolfe Trahan analyst Hunter Keay did some “very rough estimates” of what the financial impact of earnings before interest and taxes might be:

AMR: About $30 million

Delta Air Lines: About $50 million

JetBlue Airways: About $20 million

Southwest Airlines: About $10 million

Spirit Airlines: About $5 million

United Continental: About $45 million.

US Airways: About $30 million

There's more here. If you want to get a better sense of the kind of damage Sandy did to New York's travel infrastructure, Jet Blue's blog has several shocking photos of the flooding at LaGuardia Airport. The airline also tweeted a particularly bizarre photo that makes the entire airport look like a pond.