airline disaster – The Burning Platform

Southwest are the bastards that ruined our Christmas vacation. We’ll never fly their airline again.

Update (Tuesday):

After canceling almost 3,000 flights on Monday, Southwest Airlines Co. canceled thousands more on Tuesday due to adverse weather conditions and inadequate staffing.

Late Monday night, Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan spoke with WSJ, who said, “In all likelihood, we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this.” He added: “This is the largest-scale event that I’ve ever seen.”

Flight tracker FlightAware shows as of early Tuesday morning, the Dallas-based carrier canceled 2,510 flights, accounting for 62% of its schedule today.

Southwest released a statement about the continued travel chaos:

“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our Customers and Employees in a significant way that is unacceptable.”

Southwest’s cancellations prompted the US Department of Transportation to review. The agency was concerned about the airline’s “unacceptable” rate of cancellations, delays, and lack of customer service.

Shares of Southwest fell 3.5% in US premarket trading to $34.81 on the continuation of flight cancelations which may extend through Wednesday.

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Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 3,000 flights on Monday, as a historic winter storm and inadequate staffing made for a perfect storm of holiday chaos the day after Christmas.

*Passengers line up at Denver International Airport (Hyoung Chang/ Getty)*

As of 9PM on Monday, Southwest had canceled 2,882 flights – or 70% of its schedule, according to flightaware.com. Overall, 82% of Southwest flights were either canceled or delayed. By airport, Denver International saw 24% of flights canceled, while 29% were delayed.

Tomorrow is also slated to be a total mess, with over 2,400 Tuesday flights canceled.