Southwest Airlines flights cancelled more than 70 per cent of its flight operations, as extreme weather temperatures continue to disrupt the travel plans of thousands of flyers.
Almost 2,600 cancellations were made on Wednesday, of which nearly all of them belong to Southwest. The rest of the US airlines together account for a little more than 100 of those cancellations, reports CNN.
Other competitors like Alaska Airlines had 10 per cent of its flights cancelled and United Airlines had only 2%.
“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 said in a statement.
“As we continue the work to recover our operation, we have made the decision to continue operating a reduced schedule by flying roughly one-third of our schedule for the next several days.”
A combination of factors is said to have caused a total meltdown of Southwest airlines. Among them are aggressive flight scheduling and outdated infrastructure, apart from the winter storm delays.
Winter storm kills 60 across US; over 15,000 flights cancelled
For the past few days, Southwest had the largest number of cancellations among all the airlines.
On Tuesday, more than 4,700 total flights scheduled to depart were cancelled, of which 54 per cent of those belonged to Southwest.
Whereas on Monday, Southwest cancelled more than 2,800 flights, or 70 per cent of its operations, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
The spate of cancellations has invited the ire of US Department of Transportation, which has assured to make Southwest accountable for the chaos.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he spoke to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan on Tuesday about the flight cancellations.
“Their system really has completely melted down,” Buttigieg told CNN on Tuesday.
“I made clear that our department will be holding them accountable for their responsibilities to customers, both to get them through this situation and to make sure that this can’t happen again.”
(With inputs from agencies)
