Southwest Airlines CEO Warns of ‘Another Tough Day’ As Cancellations Continue

On Tuesday, Southwest Airlines canceled a majority of its flights across the U.S. in what CEO Bob Jordan warned would be “another tough day” as the airline struggles to recover from 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.”

As a winter storm, which has brought blizzard conditions to several states just before Christmas, batters major sections of the country, every airline has had to cancel or delay flights over the last several days, but Southwest is piling up a huge number of canceled flights, drawing criticism both from disgruntled passengers and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In all, nearly 4,000 flights were canceled on Monday. Of those cancellations, 2,909 were Southwest flights, 71% of the airline’s schedule. On Tuesday, over 3,100 flights were canceled nationwide, and of those, 2,571 were Southwest flights, according to FlightAware. 

In all, Southwest has been 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 offered its “heartfelt apologies” to customers in a statement Monday, saying it was working to “urgently address wide-scale disruption” and warned that it would be operating on approximately one-third of its schedule “for the next several days.”

Southwest 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. The storm also hit Denver International airport and Chicago Midway International airport the worst, which are two of the airline’s largest hubs. 

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 [cancellations] just compiled one after another — to 100 [flights], to 150, to 1,000,” Southwest Airlines’ Jay McVay said.

“With those [cancellations], 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 re-accommodate everyone that we can.”

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.”