Christmas nightmare: Hundreds of Southwest Airlines flights canceled over the weekend

Yeah, I’m here where I want to be. But getting to Dallas from Margaret Milligan on Christmas was a challenge. Margaret was supposed to fly out yesterday on southwest. She was at the airport. They cancelled her flight in Albuquerque. Nearly everyone here trying to make it home for the holidays. The lines at Dallas Love Field kept getting longer and longer. Aviation expert Steve Cosgrove says Southwest Airlines was one of the hardest hit by the storm last week. We’ve got a combination of weather crews out of position, but the problems continued. Southwest runs a very tight schedule.

As you know, they typically charter plane in 20 minutes. You start getting planes and crews out of place, it’s very tough to get them back in place. On Sunday, southwest canceled 735 flights. That’s about 19% of the flights, according to FlightAware. On Saturday, they cancelled about 38% of flights and then on Friday over 30% of flights. Or canceled northeast and the central with weather. They had fog in San Diego. They’ve got weather now hitting Seattle, they’ve had weather hitting Denver. These are all major operations. Aviation experts tell us the delays in the cancellations are not

only because of the weather, but it’s because there’s a shortage in pilots to a shortage in staff. Pilots are only allowed to fly a certain number of hours, according to the FAA. Eventually they get to a point where they

have timed out. They have worked their 16 hour duty day. They need rest. So the FAA mandates their rest periods. Council. Yeah, OK, you know. While crews and employees are doing the best they can, people are just, they just want to be with family. That’s what it boils down to in Dallas, I’m Melanie Basu.