Wednesday was another day of forgetting for U.S. airline passengers as a technology issue at the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide.
The grounding of domestic flights had a cascading effect on air travel for Southwest Airlines, one of the airlines that were affected. Southwest had as many as 49% of its flights delayed as of noon Wednesday, according to the flight tracking company Flight Aware.
It is compared to 48% for American Airlines, 40% for United, 38% for Delta and 33% for JetBlue.
Anuvu, another site that tracks flights, showed that only 7% of Southwest flights were departing on time, compared with 15% for American Airlines, 21% for United Airlines and 33% for Delta Airlines.
Southwest is still reeling from the huge disruption that occurred over the Christmas holiday that saw an estimated 11,000 of its flights canceled. The cost of the fiasco was pinned at around $800 million this week.
Southwest Airlines said in a statement that the airline is fully staffed and operating as many flights as possible on Wednesday, but we expect delays across our system on this day, shortened by the FAA ground stop that pushed the departure of our first flights on the East Coast by two to three hours. The airline canceled flights early in the morning before the ground stop was lifted.
There is no concern higher than safety and accurate, timely information from the FAA, it said.
The scale of transformation that Southwest has to do to correct the issues that led to the holiday meltdown will take more than a week to complete, said Henry Harteveldt, president and travel industry analyst at the Atmosphere Research Group.
He said the airline's outsize delays Wednesday were troubling. He said Southwest's point-to- point flight routing process, which allows the airline to fly a larger amount of passengers, could cause a cascade of delays.
Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group International aviation consultancy, said Southwest has a crew scheduling system that isn't designed to handle the current daily volume of flights.
When they were a simpler airline, you could make a phone call, Boyd said. You can't do that with 700 airplanes going through North America. They invested in a new customer reservation system, but crew scheduling is one area they haven't gotten to. Southwest Airlines will rebook customers on the next available Southwest flight with seats available to the customer's ticketed destination at no additional cost.
Southwest said it would issue a refund of the unused portion of the ticket upon request, in accordance with its contract of carriage.