That has added operational complexity, making it hard to recover from weather events and other external challenges.īy contrast, Southwest's pilot union claims that management has scheduled way too many flights given current pilot availability. Southwest executives have also noted that while the carrier is still operating fewer flights than it did before the pandemic, its flying is spread across more routes and more cities. The airline primarily blamed bad weather. Southwest Airlines has continued to cancel lots of flights over the past two weeks. Flight cancellations continued at an elevated rate in the subsequent days, as Southwest struggled to reposition flights and crews following these disruptions. The following day, a separate IT outage forced it to cancel about 500 flights and delay more than 1,300 others. A problem with a weather data provider on June 14 caused Southwest to delay more than 1,400 flights. The trouble began around the middle of the month. The carrier underperformed its top competitors by a wide margin on both metrics. More than 34,000 of its flights were delayed. Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled 2,687 flights, an average of about 90 per day. If Southwest can't get its operations back on track quickly, the airline could squander the growth opportunities it has been pursuing over the past year. However, it has struggled to operate its schedule reliably in recent weeks, because of a combination of staffing shortages, an IT outage, and bad weather. Southwest Airlines ( LUV -1.89%) has a flight cancellation problem.Īs air travel demand has come roaring back in 2021, the low-fare airline giant has rapidly ramped up flight volumes.

Southwest airlines cancelled flights