Southwest Airlines cancels thousands of flights amid winter storm | USA TODAY

The Department of Transportation is investigating after thousands of canceled flights left holiday travelers stranded across the country.

RELATED: New York hit with deadly low temperatures and heavy snow

Many airlines were forced to cancel flights due to the weather, but Southwest was the most affected. About 4,000 domestic U.S. flights were cancelled Monday, according to the tracking website FlightAware, and 2,900 of those were Southwest's. Nearly 2,500 more flights had already been canceled as of 5 a.m. Tuesday and problems are likely to continue at least into Wednesday.

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Southwest Airlines cancels thousands of flights amid winter storm | USA TODAY

15 comments

  1. If they know it always get crazy like this around these holidays, then why bother traveling??? Get together some other time…
    Use your common sense

    1. I mean work generally accommodates for people to travel during the holidays versus other times, so that’s why people choose to travel during holidays.

  2. We too were affected and I have a feeling we will never get our luggage that ended up getting to Spokane even though our flights got canceled. And to top it off Southwest will not let us file a claims report because technically our luggage is not missing. The lack of sympathy and uncaring attitudes astonished me. I have friends that work for both American and United and were flabbergasted to see all of this happening. Twice and Houston before we got told to go home we were told airplanes got downgraded from 800s to 700s which seat 40 less people. This of course started things going and I can’t imagine that something they couldn’t predicted. For the smart alecks out there yes we know it snows in winter.

  3. Southwest had the issue last year and still haven’t fixed issue. Bob Jordon suppose to fixed issues with the schedules. Upper Management seems not care about the employees and customers. If anyone is lucky to have the remembuisrmen done by Southwest for the rental car, meals, and hotels, Southwest will not pay for other airlines tickets since there is no alliance airlines available.

  4. Internal memo within the company sent out to select crew members: We started off with the Winter Storm Elliott that really put pressure on our Ground Operations. The extreme cold weather made us limit the amount of time our Ground Operations staff were exposed. We started to see equipment freeze, jet bridges freeze, fuel congeal, and as a result, we had to modify our network, sometimes shutting down Crew bases operations for a while.

    And, so we got through that part of it. I think similar to other airlines. The problem was in all those decisions, you end up impacting the Crew network. And the Crew network is a delicate thing because it’s governed by some strict regulations, and we have a complex network with Crews traveling throughout it. And, so when we finished with the winter storm, for the most part, then we found ourselves with Crew at a place where we’re not able to re-Crew the network. So, we had People that were legal. We had aircraft that were available, but the process of matching up those Crew Members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology. In our desired state, we have a solver that would be able to do that very quickly and very accurately. Our system today cannot do that.

    As a result, we had to ask our Crew Schedulers to do this manually, and it’s extraordinarily difficult. They must verify that you are legal. They can’t just have the next person up, so to speak. They have to look through everyone’s board and reassign. So that is a tedious, long process. And every day we try to repair the Crew network. They would make great progress, and then some other disruption would happen, and it would unravel their work. So, we spent multiple days where we kind of got close to finishing the problem, and then it had to be reset.

    We will now rotate into multiple days of a lower level of activity, which means we’ll have more than ample Crew resources to handle that amount of activity. It will be difficult for Crew Scheduling to reassign it for everybody, but when they get through the transition to reassign it, they will have multiple days to get People in the spot for resumption of our original lines and such. And so that’s where we need to get back to — what’s the most reliable is getting back to what you originally did. And so, these multiple days are a way to transition into that.

  5. That is one of the reasons I stood in New England I seen this storm days before it hit they been talking about it for over a week the weather forecasters said it was dangerous storm coming and I decided to stay put instead of flying. I hope all that do make it home sooner than later. God bless and stay safe everyone

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