Southwest Airlines Cancellations Climb to More than 600 as Snow hits Major Bases

Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 600 flights on Monday as relentless winter weather hit major bases for the airline in Baltimore and other carriers scrambled to recover from more than a week’s worth of challenges.

And it won’t get any easier in the days ahead.

Dallas-based Southwest canceled about 16% of its flight schedule Monday more than 2,900 flights nationwide were canceled by the nation’s air travel industry. Winter weather and the omicron variant have left carriers short-staffed with big holiday crowds. Fort Worth-based American Airlines canceled 166 flights along with hundreds more at its regional carriers and nearly every major airline in the country had significant cancellations and delays Monday.

Another 857 Southwest flights were delayed, leaving nearly two-fifths of the carrier’s schedule affected.

Southwest canceled 437 flights on Sunday, according to Flightaware.com, while American had 161 cancellations, about 5% of its flight schedule. Delta Air Lines, JetBlue and United Airlines all recorded triple-digit flight cancellations on Sunday as well.

Since Saturday, Southwest has canceled more than 1,400 flights.

Even though North Texas weather was clear Monday, DFW International Airport had 62 cancellations on arriving and departing flights, about 3% of all flights scheduled, according to FlightAware. Dallas Love Field, Southwest’s major hub, had 34 cancellations or about 5% of flights.

“Our planners continue their work to anticipate operational challenges today following the winter storm that moved across the country over the weekend, creating a band of heavy winter weather affecting the Baltimore/D.C. area Monday morning,” said Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Alyssa Foster. “Canceling hundreds of flights causes disruption across our operational system. A displacement of aircraft and employees of that magnitude brings other issues, including staffing challenge.”

Inclement weather could hassle airlines and travelers in the days ahead as well.

“We are expecting a couple more waves of this,” said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist with Accuweather. “We’ve had some rapid changes to weather conditions and all of this causing an amplification of weather challenges.”

For airlines, Monday’s schedules were only slightly better than Sunday’s, even with a lighter travel day expected.

The Transportation Security Administration recorded more than 2 million passengers on Sunday to finish the holiday travel season, a period where more than 45 million passengers have traveled through checkpoints going back to Dec. 12. It’s been, by far, the busiest travel period since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, although air travel is still 10% to 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

American Airlines flight operations have been disrupted by severe weather in Washington, D.C. which has included several inches of snow by the middle of Monday.

“It’s affecting both flights in and out of Washington, D.C., and other flight sequences for our crews,” said American Airlines spokeswoman Gianna Urgo. “The vast majority of impacted flights were precanceled yesterday so we could proactively notify and accommodate our customers and avoid last-minute disruptions at the airport.“

For American Airlines, the number of “COVID-related sick calls is consistent with what we have seen over the past few days,” Urgo said.

This weekend’s winter weather nationwide has been particularly hard on Southwest Airlines, which counts Denver International Airport and Chicago’s Midway Airport as its two biggest bases. Both areas were hit by heavy snowstorms and the wave of storms that hit the upper Midwest has now moved east to the Atlantic seaboard, dropping snow and plunging temperatures in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region.

There are still lingering problems in places such as Denver, where Southwest’s operations have slowed because “the extreme cold requires additional safety protocols for our people working outside there,” Foster said.

Unlike other airlines, Southwest has said that surging COVID-19 cases have not affected operations due to being short-staffed, although weather has created similar problems with aircraft and crew being out of place.

This could be just the beginning of several days of disruptions. Porter said Accuweather’s forecasts show another weather pattern that could approach the upper Midwest and slide into the East Coast later this week.

“The weather is not going to be helping air travelers in the coming weeks,” he said.

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