JFK Terminal 1 closure slows down St. Anthony's High School trip to perform for Pope Francis

Thousands of airline passengers, including 120 South Huntington high school students, faculty and parents traveling to Italy to perform for Pope Francis, continued to scramble Friday, after the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that Terminal 1 at Kennedy Airport would remain closed due to a power outage that first disrupted flights Thursday.

The terminal, which serves international airline flights and represents about 5% of all scheduled Kennedy passenger flights, was expected to resume limited operations on Saturday after being shuttered on Friday.

“The Port Authority continues to work with Terminal 1’s operator to complete repairs, restore power and resume flight operations at the terminal as soon as possible," the agency, which operates Kennedy, said in a statement. "No other terminals at the airport are affected."

There were 64 scheduled Terminal 1 arrivals and departures on Friday, the Port Authority said. A total of 39 were canceled, 13 were redirected to other terminals and 12 went to other local airports.

"Contingent on the completion of repairs and testing, we anticipate the start of limited operations at Terminal 1 on Saturday," the Port Authority said. "Travelers should continue to check with their carriers for flight status before coming to Terminal 1. We will perform a thorough review in conjunction with the private entity that operates Terminal 1.”

Among those left scrambling were the chorus and band from St. Anthony's High School who were expected to fly to Milan on Thursday afternoon for a 10-day musical and religious pilgrimage that would be capped with a Feb. 22 performance for the pope.

The group, which includes 80 students ages 14 to 17, nearly a dozen faculty and almost 30 parental chaperones, were bumped from their original 4 p.m. flight because of the ongoing Lufthansa Airlines strike in Germany, said Christina Buehler, the school's director of communications.

They were then booked on a flight with Neos Airlines, an Italian carrier, whose staff were forced to write out luggage tags and boarding passes by hand because of the electrical issues before that flight also was canceled, Buehler said.

The group then traveled by bus to Newark Airport in New Jersey where they were eventually able to depart on a 1 a.m. flight that landed in Milan at 7:45 a.m., said Brother Joshua DiMauro, OSF, the school's assistant principal, who is traveling with the students.

"We were very fortunate to get out," DiMauro told Newsday only hours after the flight landed. "Every single piece of luggage and every instrument all got through. We were so amazed. It was a miracle."

The power outage was pinned on an electrical panel failure, which also sparked a small, isolated fire overnight that was extinguished early Thursday, officials said.

The outage affected the terminal’s ability to accept inbound and outbound flights Thursday, officials announced on Twitter. Some flights had to go to other terminals while others were diverted to other airports, according to the Kennedy Airport website.

Among the canceled flights were six Swiss flights, five Air France flights, four ITA Airways flights and flights affecting Brussels, Korean, Japan, Philippine Airlines that all generally use Terminal 1. Korean was reporting three delayed flights, Air France two.

In a statement to Newsday on Friday, Swiss spokesman Michael Stief said about 1,900 customers of the airline had been affected since the disruptions began. He said the carrier had been "able to offer around half of them alternatives right away."

Swiss said on Thursday the power failure at Terminal 1 forced two flights from Zurich to Kennedy to divert to Newark, while a flight from Geneva to Kennedy was forced to divert to Boston. 

"For [Friday], we canceled all three flights from Switzerland to JFK (one from Geneva, two from Zurich) and back," Stief said in the statement to Newsday.

 On Thursday, a flight from Auckland, New Zealand to Kennedy was forced to turned back midway through the 9,000-mile trip — the 787 had been in the air for eight hours at the time — because of the power disruption, records show. Flight data shows that when the plane landed back in Auckland the passengers had been in the air for 16 hours. 

With Joan Gralla and Cecilia Dowd