Southwest Airlines Cancels Over 200 Flights Due To Maintenance Issues

More than 200 flights across the United States were cancelled by Southwest Airlines on Tuesday due to maintenance and weather-related issues.

The delays are affecting flights at the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston where there were a couple of cancellations and as many as 14 delayed flights. On Tuesday, over 40 planes had maintenance issues, which is more than twice the average number on a typical day.

The cancellations set off a chain of flight disruptions all over the country. Data on flight-tracking website FlightAware at 23.30 EST showed that the airline had cancelled 284 flights Tuesday.

“We are asking that customers check Southwest.com for the latest on their specific flights as our operational planners are actively working in the background to minimize impacts on their travel plans. We do not have city-specific operational cancellation numbers to share,” Southwest said in a statement.

The airlines said that there was no common theme to the maintenance events and that they had issued an “all hands” demand to maintenance crews.

Southwest told employees who were allegedly sick that they will need to prove they actually were sick with a note from a doctor upon returning to work. The airlines told mechanics that due to the emergency they would have to show up for work and if they didn’t follow company protocols, they would face termination. The “operational emergency” which was limited only to Las Vegas, Houston and Phoenix, was extended to Dallas on Tuesday.

Southwest Airlines said the cancellations may also be weather related. The carrier also had more than twice the daily average number of aircrafts suddenly out of service for maintenance. In a statement to the media, the airlines said, “We want to point out that this is not a ‘grounding’ of aircraft—it’s a routine part of our business to consistently review aircraft within our fleet and fix anything reported by a mechanic.”

Meanwhile, passengers were unhappy with the delays and cancellations they were facing. Several flyers had to cancel or reschedule their flights and some of them were left wondering if they would be spending the night at the airport. But a few passengers said the airlines would do whatever was needed to be done as well as they could.

Southwest has 750 aircraft in its fleet and on a regular day it expects about 20 of them to require service. But everyday in the last week, that number has doubled.

The airlines issued a statement that the maintenance organization will continue to operate under a staffing protocol enacted last week to maximize the availability of mechanics across all the shifts.

The maintenance issues also come in as the Federal Aviation Administration investigates how the airline tracks the weight of checked-in bags on flights. The investigation began February 2018 and according to the FAA officials and agency documents there were mistakes made by the airline employees that caused pilots to compute the weight of planes wrongly. Describing the errors “systematic and significant,” the Wall Street Journal, which reported the story on Feb. 18, 2019, said that the errors caused the takeoff weights to be as much as 1,000 pounds lower than the plane’s actual weight.

The airline said that it had already put controls and procedures in place to address the weight and balance issues and that there was an “ongoing effort to track and voluntarily report operation data to the FAA” so they could alleviate and reduce any operational risks.