The U.S. Transportation Department is now investigating what happened at Southwest, which carries more passengers within the United States than any other airline.
DALLAS — Southwest Airlines continued to extract itself from sustained scheduling chaos Thursday, cancelling another 2,350 flights after a winter storm overwhelmed its operations days ago.
The Dallas carrier acknowledged it has inadequate and outdated operations technology that can leave flight crews out of position when adverse weather strikes.
Other airlines recovered from ferocious winter storms that hit large swaths of the country over the weekend, but not Southwest, which scrubbed 2,500 flights Wednesday and 2,300 more on Thursday.
The company said in a statement that it hoped to resume normal operations with minimal disruptions on Friday. However, according to Flightaware, which tracks cancelations, about a quarter of Southwest’s flights for that day were listed as canceled.
Flightaware shows 6% of Saturday’s flights are canceled.
The Dallas airline was undone by a combination of factors including an antiquated crew-scheduling system and a network design that allows cancellations in one region to cascade throughout the country rapidly. Those weaknesses are not new — they helped cause a similar failure by Southwest in October 2021.
The U.S. Transportation Department is now investigating what happened at Southwest, which carries more passengers within the United States than any other airline. A Senate committee promises to investigate too.
In a video that Southwest posted late Tuesday, CEO Robert Jordan said Southwest would operate a reduced schedule for several days but hoped to be “back on track before next week.”
“We have some real work to do in making this right,” said Jordan, a 34-year Southwest veteran who became CEO in February. “For now, I want you to know that we are committed to that.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has criticized airlines for previous disruptions, said that “meltdown” was the only word he could think of to describe this week’s events at Southwest. He noted that while cancellations across the rest of the industry declined to about 4% of scheduled flights, they remained above 60% at Southwest.
From the high rate of cancellations to customers’ inability to reach Southwest on the phone, the airline’s performance has been unacceptable, Buttigieg said. He vowed to hold the airline accountable and push it to reimburse travelers.
“They need to make sure that those stranded passengers get to where they need to go and that they are provided adequate compensation,” including for missed flights, hotels and meals, he said Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
As has been the case every day this week, the vast majority of flight cancellations nationwide, are Southwest flights.
There were 2,451 flights cancelled before noon Thursday in the U.S., and 2,357 were Southwest routes, or about 58% of its entire schedule, according to the FlightAware tracking service.
The airline has warned that cancellations will continue for days.
The federal government is investigating what happened at Southwest with total cancellations soaring past 10,000 early in the week.
Southwest added a page to their website specifically for travelers who were stranded, but thousands of customers remain unable to reach the airline.
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