The bookworm problem is an old example of intended increase of problem condition. So it makes sense to supsect this problem also. I don't understand reference to the problem 1484. It is more difficult to code algorithm that produces output 1.1(0001) instead of 1.(0001), the mistake who some have made. So I'll consider this reference spurious.
Does that mean the CURRENT statement is not the statement used in the contest?What is the reason to assign origin of delays to midnight if it only adds a single if statement to a solution?

Actually, English future-in-the-past ("would leave") is intended to serve as a key (If Russian statement was written first, reference to "этого момента" was removed). Of course, if English isn't person native language it is not easy to understand.

Even more, the statement contains "meteorological, economic, and geopolitical reasons" which is obscuring and misleading evidence. If author had written that "a bug caused software malfunction and flights would leave later" it would be much clearer. In the bookworm problem, we have to apply common sense. In this problem, we have to neglect it (the obscuring reasons list), and the only valid key is verb tense. It is worth mention in naming problems authors are not so precise with English grammar (articles are missing when they are required), which is, of course, liberate way of using English language.
Of course, we might ever come to problems requiring knowledge of assembler, nuclear physics, linguistics or even biology. I don't say if it would make contests better of worse, but that would make them different.