Spring Break Travel Troubles: 10,000 Weekend Flights Canceled, Delayed
Americans traveling for Spring Break this weekend have had a hard time of it. Anyone with air travel plans on Sunday should be sure to check on the status of their flight before heading out to the airport or they may risk spending quite a bit of extra time waiting there.
According to USA Today, U.S. airlines were forced to cancel or delay over 10,000 flights on Saturday and Sunday, due to Florida storms and technology problems at Southwest Airlines. Thus far, the breakdown has come to roughly 3,200 cancelled flights and 7,000 delays from both weekend days combined. The result has been a whole host of airline passengers stranded around the country and drawn-out wait times for those trying to reach customer service centers.
This air travel turmoil has arisen during the high-traffic Spring Break season, which is particularly busy this year, as pandemic-related restrictions are lifted across the nation, and increasingly in other countries, and people’s pent-up desire to travel is set loose. That’s despite increases in the cost of airfare, since sky-high fuel prices have been driven up by the Russian war on Ukraine.
The U.S.’ largest domestic carrier, Southwest, has been the most heavily impacted by this weekend’s disruptions, with 520 flights cancelled Saturday (14 percent of its overall operation) and 398 cancelled Sunday (10 percent of its daily operation), according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Southwest has previously stated that between 40 and 50 percent of its flights pass through Florida on any given day, making the hostile weather conditions there particularly painful, but the airline had to contend with technological issues that emerged early on Saturday. In a statement given to Fox Business, Southwest described the culprit as, “intermittent performance issues following routine overnight maintenance of some of [its] backend technology.”
Texas’ KPRC said that Saturday’s malfunction was caused by a “planned system outage” and a Houston Airports spokesperson told the outlet that the system was down for two hours on Saturday morning, causing an operations backup. Likewise, WNCN reported that what it called a “nationwide system failure” was causing delays out of North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
“We offer heartfelt apologies to our customers for any inconvenience, and gratitude to our employees who are working diligently to make it up to them,” the airline said. “We’ll continue to update customers whose journey with us today might be delayed as a result of the now-resolved issues.”