WASHINGTON — The CEO of Southwest Airlines apologized for the weeklong chaos for travelers stranded when the company canceled thousands of flights amid a winter storm across much of the U.S.
Friday was the first day since Christmas Day that Southwest didn't have a double-digit percentage of its flights canceled. In an on-air interview with Good Morning America, CEO Bob Jordan said the return to regular operations was going smoothly.
"We’re off to a great start today," he said. "We’ve launched to the east coast and we have a great operation underway. It's our full schedule: 3900+ flights."
Jordan blamed the winter storm's impact for the massive bottleneck on flights, saying that Southwest's wide footprint hurt it more than other airlines such as Delta and United, who recovered quickly and didn't have anywhere close to the number of cancellations Southwest did.
"This was just an unprecedented storm for all airlines. It was widespread across the country, record cold," Jordan said. "What’s different for us is we’re the top airline in 23 of the top 50 cities so it just hit so many large locations all at the same time."
When pressed on why Southwest had so many issues compared to other airlines, he said the company's problems over the past week were widespread.
"We had impacts beyond the storm that obviously impacted Southwest. It really was the scope of the problems we were looking to solve," he said. "We have great tools, we have regular operations that serve us well. But this is something we’ve never seen in our 51 years."
Many have blamed the airline's scheduling system as part of the problem, with some crews unable to get in touch with the people in charge of scheduling them.
While Jordan said Southwest would improve its infrastructure after the incident, he didn't give specifics about what parts of that infrastructure went wrong and how they would be corrected.
"We’re making investments in our operations as always," he said.
The airline has scrapped more than 13,000 flights since Dec. 22, according to tracking service FlightAware. Its planes have 143 to 175 seats and were likely nearly fully booked around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Airline executives said that crew-scheduling technology — a major cause of the meltdown — has caught up with the backlog of pilots and flight attendants stranded in wrong locations. Southwest operated 1,600 flights on Thursday, including 104 that carried no passengers but instead served to put planes and crews in position for full operations on Friday.
Southwest leaders believe they will have enough empty seats over the next several days to accommodate any stranded passengers still wishing to fly on the airline — while conceding that many had either given up or found other transportation.
Southwest will refund tickets on canceled flights, and executives repeated a promise to reimburse travelers who were forced to pay for hotel rooms, meals and flights on other airlines. The airline’s chief commercial officer said that process will take several weeks. Executives said the airline also will pay to ship baggage that has piled up at airports around the country.
Southwest lost $75 million during a much smaller disruption in October 2021 that resulted in about 2,000 canceled flights over a four-day stretch.
It's too early to say exactly how much the airline will lose in revenue after this latest incident.
"There is almost no way to apologize enough," Jordan told GMA.