by Kyle Becker, Becker News:
Thousands of passengers are scrambling to rearrange their travel plans this holiday season after Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights.
Southwest Airlines made the recent announcement to customers that alternate flights may not be available to them until after New Year’s Eve.
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#SOUTHWEST NIGHTMARE: All flights leaving San Diego tonight are canceled, announcement just now over the intercom says the airline is “frozen and not able to assist with rebooking.” People are told find their bags in these piles. Several are in tears. @10News pic.twitter.com/cpUfblhV5t
— Laura Acevedo (@10NewsAcevedo) December 27, 2022
While the chaos is being attributed to the fallout from a powerful winter storm, the flight cancellations have impacted customers around the nation — including in southern states that have been largely unaffected by winter storms.
There were more than 2,800 flights canceled as of Tuesday morning, but the great majority of them — 2,526 flights — were for Southwest Airlines, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told the Wall Street Journal that the airline planned to operate at around one-third of regular capacity as it attempted to get flights back on track.
“This is the largest scale event that I’ve ever seen,” he said.
The unprecedented nature of the Southwest Airlines flight outage has many wondering if there are deeper system issues that have affected the airline.
One Southwest Pilot, Tom Bogart, revealed what he believes is behind the mass flight disruption.
“The question is, why are we having a staffing shortage?” he asked. “I believe it’s because of the COVID vaccines — they’re still requiring the vaccination for all new applicants and if the new applicants say they’re not going to get vaccinated, their application is passed over.”
