And our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning. 'We anticipate additional changes with an already reduced level of flights as we approach the coming New Year holiday travel period.Īdditionally, 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. 'This is the largest scale event that I’ve ever seen.' Southwest releases statement In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,' he said Monday evening. Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that the airline would operate just over a third of its usual schedule to allow crews to get back to where they needed to be. The Department of Transportation said on Twitter that it was 'concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancelations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service.' The tweet said the department would look into whether Southwest could have done anything about the cancelations and whether the airline was complying with its customer service plan.

Passengers stood in long lines trying to rebook their flights. Tuesday and problems are likely to continue at least into Wednesday. More than 2,800 more flights had already been canceled in the U.S. RELATED: Southwest Airlines CEO releases video statement following cancellation of thousands of flights 'And that’s exactly how we ended up where we are today.' 'So we’ve been chasing our tails, trying to catch up and get back to normal safely, which is our number one priority as quickly as we could,' he said. Southwest spokesman Jay McVay said at a press conference in Houston that cancelations snowballed as storm systems moved across the country, leaving flight crews and planes out of place. The cancelation rate at Southwest Airlines was 62%, according to FlightAware. Other major airlines, including American, United, Delta and JetBlue, suffered cancelations rates of between none and 2%. RELATED: Southwest cancels more flights as Senate, Buttigieg promise investigations flights were canceled Monday, according to the tracking website FlightAware, and 2,900 of those were Southwest’s. Many airlines were forced to cancel flights due to the weather, but Southwest was by far the leader in canceled flights.

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