Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds of flights Monday. Here’s impact at Fresno airport

After a weekend of major service interruptions, Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds more flights on Monday, including two at Fresno Yosemite International.

The Dallas-based airline had blamed air traffic control issues and bad weather for weekend “operational challenges” that resulted in 1,900 canceled flights between Saturday and Sunday. Southwest, though, was the only airline to report such a large percentage of canceled and delayed flights over the weekend, the Associated Press reported.

In a statement to The Bee, the airline apologized to its customers and employees for the cancellations and delays. The airline said it ended Friday with numerous cancellations, “primarily created by weather and other external constraints.”

This left aircraft and crews out of pre-planned positions to operate the airline’s schedule for Saturday.

“The out-of-place aircraft and continued strain on our crew resources created additional cancelations across our point-to-point network that cascaded throughout the weekend and into Monday,” the airline said.

The weekend’s affects were felt in Fresno, where Southwest canceled two flights at FYI on Sunday, according to the website Flightaware.com. That accounts for 40% of the airline’s total traffic into and out of the airport for the day.

Three flights, or 60% of the traffic, were delayed.

American Airlines and Allegiant Air also had canceled flights on Sunday.

On Monday, two more Southwest Airlines flights were canceled for the day, including the 7 a.m. to Las Vegas and a flight in from Denver. Just one Southwest flight had been delayed.

“Southwest teams have been working diligently to restore stability to the network, and we are experiencing less disruptions on Monday,” the airline said.

“We hope to restore our full schedule as soon as possible.”

The disruptions come as the airline’s pilots union asked a federal court to block an order to have all employees get vaccinated against COVID-19. The union denied reports that pilots were conducting a sickout or slowdown to protest the vaccine mandate, according to AP.

Southwest Airlines also said the operational challenges were not a result of employee demonstrations..

Southwest Airlines launched its schedule of flights to and from Fresno in late April. By May, the airline was carrying the third-largest number of passengers aboard its departing flights of all other carriers at FYI, behind SkyWest Airlines and mainline flights by American Airlines.

That month, Southwest carried 12,759 departing passengers in May, or about 16% of the 78,012 airline passengers who flew from Fresno.

AP contributed to this story.

This story was originally published October 11, 2021 at 2:00 PM.