Holiday mayhem: More than 80% of Southwest flights at Sacramento airport canceled
Mass flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines have created mayhem across the U.S. for holiday travelers, including at Sacramento International Airport, where more than 80% of the airline’s flights had been canceled as of Tuesday morning.
Flight Aware, flight tracking website, showed Sacramento International with the second-highest cancellation rate Tuesday among all U.S. airports, with 40% of arrivals and 40% of departures canceled across all airlines as of 2:30 p.m. Only Buffalo Niagara International Airport in New York, which saw feet of snow dump in recent days, had higher rates at 86% of departures and 78% of arrivals canceled.
The cancellations forced holiday travelers to scramble for ways to make connections, visit relatives or just get home. Caught in in this web of travel misery were Emily and Colter Bergh of Lake Placid, New York, whose canceled flights resulted in a cross-country odyssey from upstate New York to California for Christmas.
The family, with their three children, ultimately landed in Sacramento on Tuesday, days behind schedule.
“We were supposed to get here for Christmas Eve,” Emily, said as she hunted through rows of luggage in Sacramento International Airport’s Terminal B.
Instead, Emily and her family were stranded 30 hours in Chicago before her husband was able to get onto a flight to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, where he rented a car for the marathon drive to Sacramento.
Meantime, Emily and their children finally found a flight to San Jose and hailed an Uber for the two-plus hour drive to Sacramento International Tuesday morning.
Southwest flight cancellations add up
Car rental companies were taxed as families like the Berghs shifted from air to roads to map their way through the labyrinth of stalled travel caused by the enormous number of canceled flights.
A staggering 57 of 68 Southwest flights set to arrive at or depart from Sacramento International on Tuesday – about 84% – had been canceled, the airport’s website showed as of 9 a.m.
By 12:45 p.m., the airport reported only one Southwest flight had departed from Sacramento, en route to Los Angeles after more than a 90-minute delay.
Only three Southwest flights had landed at Sacramento International, including one from Denver that was nearly two hours late and one from Las Vegas that landed more than three hours late.
The airline’s 68 planned flights represented close to two-thirds of the airport’s total for the day.
Between 7 a.m. Monday and 7 a.m. Tuesday, Southwest had canceled more than 2,500 of its flights nationwide, or about 63% of its planned takeoffs, according to real-time data from Flight Aware.
Even higher percentages of Southwest flights were canceled at several major California airports. Flight Aware data showed 79% of the airline’s Tuesday flights at San Francisco International, 76% at Sacramento International and 75% at San Diego International canceled for the 24-hour period ending 7 a.m. Tuesday.
“As we continue the work to recover our operation, we have made the decision to continue operating a reduced schedule by flying roughly one third of our schedule for the next several days,” Southwest Airlines said in a Monday statement posted to its website.
What happened with Southwest
The major disruption follows an extreme arctic blast winter storm that pummeled the eastern two-thirds of the country starting last week and continuing into Christmas weekend, one of the busiest of the year for air travel.
Travelers posted images to social media Sunday and Monday showing long lines and piles of luggage at airports nationwide, including Sacramento.
The U.S. Department of Transportation, in a statement posted to social media, said it was “concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service.”
“The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan,” the department tweeted Monday evening.
Southwest recorded by far the highest flight cancellation rate Monday. Next highest among U.S. domestic airlines was Spirit, with 10% of its flights canceled from 7 a.m. Monday to 7 a.m. Tuesday, Flight Aware numbers showed.
Southwest in a Monday news release said it was “fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend” but that mass cancellations were brought on by the winter storm.
Sacramento International on Tuesday reported no cancellations among 11 scheduled flights on Alaska Airlines or 10 on Delta.
The saga continues
Emily Bergh was able to retrieve her family’s luggage.
“We lost four days of our five-day vacation,” she said.
Still the story doesn’t end there. How they will get home is still an open question.
“Our return flights were canceled,” she said.
This story was originally published December 27, 2022 at 8:09 AM.
