Winter storm: US Govt initiates probe against Southwest Airlines over mass flight cancellations

The government of the USA has initiated a probe on Southwest Airlines as it cancelled over 2,900 flights on the ground of bad weather.

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A slew of airlines cancelled their scheduled flights, forced by bad weather. However, Southwest airlines topped the charts by cancelling over 2,900 flights, leaving passengers stranded at airports across the USA. Amused by this, the Department of Transportation has initiated a probe into the matter. As per the tracking website FlightAware, around 4,000 flights were cancelled. Other major airliners in the list include American, United, Delta and JetBlue. While these airlines had cancellations rates of between none and 2%, the cancellation rate at Southwest Airlines was 62%, according to FlightAware.

Southwest spokesman Jay McVay said at a press conference in Houston that cancellations snowballed as storm systems moved across the country, leaving flight crews and planes out of place

"So we've been chasing our tails, trying to catch up and get back to normal safely, which is our number one priority as quickly as we could," he said. "And that's exactly how we ended up where we are today."

Southwest said it was fully staffed for the holiday weekend.

More than 2,800 more flights had already been canceled by all airlines operating in the U.S. As of 7 a.M. Tuesday and problems are likely to continue at least into Wednesday.

Southwest said late Monday that in order to prevent last-minute disruptions for passengers, it will continue operating a reduced schedule with roughly one third scheduled flights for the next several days.

Passengers stood in long lines trying to rebook their flights. The Department of Transportation said on Twitter that it was "concerned by Southwest's unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service." The tweet said the department would look into whether Southwest could have done anything about the cancellations and whether the airline was complying with its customer service plan.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that the airline would operate just over a third of its usual schedule to allow crews to get back to where they needed to be.

"We had a tough day today. In all likelihood we'll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this," he said Monday evening.

With inputs from PTI