Plane travel stymied by storm TRAVELLERS trying to get to and from Queensland at the end of the long weekend face delays and disruptions due to strong cross winds and a Telstra outage caused by the wild weather. Virgin Australia said it had cancelled 43 flights by mid-morning because of cross winds and was experiencing delays' of up to two hours. "We have major issues with cross-winds with gusts up to 40 knots in areas such as Coolangatta, Brisbane Airport and some of the other ports in South-East Queensland," a Virgin spokesman said. And that's causing us issues because we're not able to get the planes out of those ports. And unfortunately because it's both Brisbane and Coolangatta the recovery options are mainly tomorrow for those guests on cancelled flights. The spokesman said Virgin's policy was to make sure no-one was out of pocket over the weekend, even if they were unable to contact the airline or failed to show up at the airport. "We've had some people that are stranded by floods around the Brisbane area and things like that," he said. He said the airline had posted a major disruption page on its website with a list of cancelled flights and details about its policies, which allow people to defer travel until Wednesday. "What we're really trying to ask guests to do is actually check their particular flight status online because that will let them know whether there have been delays of up to two hours, for example, and hopefully that will minimise the wait time at the airport," he said. Qantas was reporting two-hour delays in Northern Queensland due to a Telstra problem which had affected its reservation system and had cancelled two return flights this morning one this afternoon due to the Coolangatta cross winds. A spokeswoman said the Telstra outage in northern Queensland had meant the airline had been forced to revert to manual check-in. She said the problem, had affected airports at Weipa, Rockhampton , Longreach, Mackay, Emerald , Hamilton Island, Blackall, Gladstone, Townsville and Mount Isa. "But at the moment Qantas mainline is operating relatively normally considering but there area few delays out of Brisbane because of the weather," she said.