It's another day of mass flight cancelations for Spirit Airlines, which have left thousands of travelers stranded across the United States since troubles began on Sunday.
The airline has canceled more than 250 flights for Friday, about 33% of its schedule for the day, according to flight tracker FlightAware.
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Spirit has canceled nearly 2,000 flights since Sunday as it deals with tech outages and staffing shortages.
CEO Ted Christie publicly addressed the debacle for the first time on Thursday night, saying crews were short on pilots and flight attendants with eligible hours to staff planes, which had to be grounded.
"When we started canceling, our crews got dislocated throughout the system. They were in the wrong places at the wrong time," Christie told ABC News. "We needed to start to build that puzzle back together again. And unfortunately that takes our group a lot of time to do. So we started canceling deeper and deeper into the operation to give them that time."
Christie said the airline simply wasn't prepared for such a "disruption."
"When we reach this level of disruption, being able to recover does require a lot of resources," he said. "We're not built to deal with this level of disruption and I think there’s some learning in there about how we might create variability in staffing so that we can deal with it."
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The CEO admitted that passengers will continue to see flights canceled until the airline can get operations back on track.
"We are starting to turn the tide here and get our operation moving again," he said. "There will still be cancellations over the next few days, but we can start to build back to the full operation, and then build from the takeaways that we get from this last week."
Christie estimated that "hundreds of thousands" of customers have been affected by the disruptions. He said the airline is giving those customers cash refunds.
The discount airline has said overlapping operational challenges including weather, system outages and staffing shortages "caused widespread irregularities" in their operation. Spirit said it was implementing a "more thorough reboot of the network" which would allow it to reassign crews more efficiently and restore the network faster, which would bring down cancelations. As of Friday, it appears the airline is making some progress.
On Thursday, less than half of Spirit's scheduled flights left airports as planned, with more than 400 cancelations. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Spirit canceled more than 400 flights per day, or 60% percent of its operation.
Travelers are urged to check their flight status before heading to the airport.
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