After several days of travel delays, Southwest Airlines is still having problems putting its holiday travel problems behind.
According to the website FlightAware.com the Dallas-based airline is still canceling or delaying almost a quarter of today's flights.
All the major carriers promised Congress they were ready for the holidays, but with nationwide weather issues on top of the COVID-19 Omicron variant sickening untold numbers of employees, the combined problems left thousands of passengers stranded due to canceled flights.
Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, says it comes back to the same scheduling issues that Southwest has been grappling with since Columbus Day. He says it's a self-inflicted problem.
"We saw seventy percent of our pilots flying when they weren't scheduled to fly, and when you have that happen it's not recoverable" said Murray. "So it's not just those things that affect over a day, like weather, it's how we recover from them."
Murray says a big problem is that Southwest has the same number of flights operating today as in 2019, but now with a 25-percent staff reduction.
Southwest has not returned KRLD's request for an interview.
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