Southwest Airlines canceled a majority of its flights across the U.S. Tuesday in what CEO Bob Jordan warned would be “another tough day” as the airline continues to grapple with widespread operational disruptions.
“We had a tough day today,” Jordan told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Monday evening. “In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this. This is the largest-scale event that I’ve ever seen.”
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The airline canceled 2,909 flights on Monday, amounting to 71% of its schedule, amid a winter storm impacting portions of the country. Every airline has had to cancel or delay flights over the last several days, but Southwest’s totals are particularly high — drawing criticism from disgruntled passengers and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Southwest offered its “heartfelt apologies” to customers in a statement Monday where the airline said it was working to “urgently address wide-scale disruption,” and warned that it would be operating on roughly one third of its schedule “for the next several days.”
Southwest did not immediately respond to FOX Business‘ request for an updated statement Tuesday morning.
As of around 1 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, more than 3,100 flights in total were canceled within, into, or out of the U.S. for the day according to flight tracking site FlightAware. Most of those cancelations were from Southwest, which scrapped 2,571, or 63% of its flights.
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A major winter storm that brought blizzard conditions to several states just before Christmas wreaked havoc on holiday travel, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports across the country following widespread flight delays and cancelations.
Southwest was impacted far worse than other airlines, and was forced to scrap more than 12,000 flights since Friday. Other carriers appear to have largely recovered from the disruptions caused by the storm, but Southwest is still reeling.
The airline relies more on point-to-point service rather than operating out of large hubs like other major U.S. carriers, which means its staff is more vulnerable to being stranded when disruptions occur. Southwest said the disruptions will likely continue for several days.
“As the storm continued to sweep across the country, it continued to impact many of our larger stations and so the cancelations just compiled one after another — to 100 (flights), to 150, to 1,000,” Southwest Airlines’ Jay McVay explained.
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“With those cancelations, you end up with flight crews and airplanes that are out [of] place and not in the cities that they need to be in to continue to run our operations — that is ultimately exactly how we ended up where we are,” McVay continued. “It’s trying to get our flight crews back into cities where they need to be to operate our flight schedules and then reaccommodate everyone that we can.”
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A Southwest spokesperson said Monday, “”We anticipate additional changes with an already reduced level of flights as we approach the coming New Year holiday travel period.”
FOX Business’ Landon Mion, Ernie Sadashige, and FOX Weather’s Heather Brinkman contributed to this report.