Greece continues to dance on the edge of default, the other PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) are in various states of economic disarray, all 27 members of the European Union are at each other's metaphoric throats, and the euro as a street currency may not be long for this world.

But, hey, it could be worse. You could be a business traveler trying to fly in Europe just now.

Thanks to a foul combination of strikes, airline failures, and a brutal winter that's made Rome snowier than Moscow and Paris colder than Oslo, European business travel has slowed to a crawl.

FlightStats.com reports that there were nearly 26,000 delays and about 3,400 flight cancellations last week in Europe. That's a greater number of cancellations than in North America and Asia combined. This week has been even more chaotic. There were more than 900 cancellations and almost 5,000 delays on Sunday and approximately the same amounts on Monday. Before noon along the U.S. East Coast on Tuesday, more than 600 flights were canceled and around 2,600 delayed.

"All of Europe wants to fly to Florida just now," one top executive of a major continental carrier told me via email Monday afternoon. "But I just canceled my Miami departure because the aircraft is stuck in the snow."

He may or may not have been joking—I didn't check the status of his Miami-bound flight—but his black humor is appropriate. The winter has been sad and brutal. Hundreds have died due to the extreme cold and the extraordinary snowfalls. But this will pass. And besides, winter is always lousy somewhere, and still business travelers soldier on.

But once the snow melts off the Spanish Steps and they get around to deicing the runways at London's airports, Europe's frosty aviation sector will still be in big trouble, and business travelers will have to scramble to adjust.

Just in the last few weeks, two European carriers have collapsed. Government-owned Malev of Hungary shut down last Friday when no white knight came forward to rescue the debt-laden carrier. The previous Friday, Spanair, based in Barcelona, shut down after Qatar Airways walked away from a rescue deal. Air Berlin, Germany's second-largest airline and Europe's sixth-largest in terms of passengers carried, is still flying only because it did get a huge injection of capital from the Middle East when Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi purchased a 30 percent stake.

Then there are the strikes mounted by airline workers facing contract givebacks and other major concessions. A four-day work stoppage against Air France, due to last through Thursday evening, has grounded upwards of half of the airline's service this week. The Air France action follows strikes that have temporarily disrupted flights in Belgium, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Finnair and British Airways are still dealing with the fallout from recent battles with their cabin crews. Lufthansa is looking for concessions from its employees and has barely escaped strike action in the last year. Aer Lingus of Ireland is constantly at war with its unions, and, to be honest, no European carrier is totally at peace with its employees.