Southwest Airlines suffered delays of over 75% of its flights last weekend

Over 75% of departing and arriving Southwest Airlines flights into Raleigh-Durham International Airport were delayed last Saturday. The reason behind the delays was a series of problems with the airline’s computer system that ended up causing the delays and cancellations.

At 10:30 am LT of last Saturday 13 out of 16 Southwest Airlines flights that were getting ready to depart and 12 out of 16 that were about to arrive were delayed, this according to the airlines timetable at Raleigh-Durham. The problem turned into a nightmare that ended up delaying hundreds of flights systemwide. 

• More great content from Transponder1200: Pilots sue Southwest Airlines over vaccine mandate

Nationally, 99.5 Southwest Airlines flights were delayed and 184 were canceled altogether and this was just on Saturday morning. The airline declined to comment further regarding how many flights had been affected by the systemwide computer problem or if the issues were poised to continue beyond the weekend.

The airline released a statement where they said that some of their flights with early departures were delayed last Saturday and that “just a handful” resulted in cancellations. The problem was reported as intermittent failures of performance that resulted from some routine nightly maintenance of their reservations systems.

In the release the airline offers their sincere apologies to all the affected passengers and expresses is grateful to all their employees who worked tirelessly and diligently to compensate for these “failures”. The airline didn’t clarify the meaning behind “intermittent performance failures”.

The delays were observed for several hours and in the end they were attributed to system issues nationwide and ultimately to the poor weather conditions in the eastern seaboard of the United States last weekend. The reality here is that US airlines are sorely understaffed and are in dire need of more hands to keep the lanes flying every time there’s a contingency. With Spring Break upon us, we hope this is the last time we see this and that next summer is more organized.