Southwest Airlines Starts Thursday with More Than 530 Cancellations Nationwide

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines started Thursday with more than 530 cancellations nationwide, a number that is sure to grow as another round of winter weather hits the central part of the country.

Nashville International led the country with more 198 cancellations, according to Flightaware.com. That’s about a third of all flights out of the Tennessee airport after Southwest and other carriers preemptively cut flights heading into Thursday with the region expecting five to six inches of snow today.

The same storm is sweeping through Missouri, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri as it makes its way to the East Coast to pile on winter weather from earlier this week that shut down hundreds of flights in Maryland, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

Southwest has said the recent streak of cancellations is due to weather and not staffing issues from the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant, but the company did tell employees Tuesday that it was going to offer bonus pay to flight attendants that pick up certain shifts during between Jan. 4 and 25.

“Our hope is to stabilize the operation again as we work through winter storms, navigate the national COVID-19 spike, and maintain sufficient staffing,” the company said in a memo to flight attendants Tuesday.

It’s a similar move to the one made by United, which is offering pilots bonus pay of up to three times normal pay to pick up shifts in January, according to CNBC.

Chicago-based United Airlines has canceled 215 of its Thursday flights and regional carrier SkyWest, which flies for American, United and others, has canceled 195.

Some 1,462 flights have been canceled nationwide Thursday, making a 12-day streak where more than 1,000 flights have been canceled in the United States. Southwest is also dealing with 118 delays nationwide, according to Flightaware.com.

Airports in Denver, Chicago, Newark and Seattle are also coping with triple-digit cancellations numbers.

Southwest’s cancellations total about one-sixth of the carrier’s nationwide schedule, after canceling 530 flights on Wednesday and about 400 on Tuesday.

So far Thursday, 51 flights in and out of Dallas Love Field have been canceled and 12 delayed, about 10% of the airport’s flights. About 34 flights from DFW International Flights have been canceled, less than 1% of flights at the airport.

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