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Oct. 11—When Julie Holland finally got home Sunday night, it was 10 minutes to 3 a.m. Her flight had been scheduled to land more than six hours earlier.
"Walking around the airport you'd see the list of 'canceled, canceled, canceled' all down the screen," said Holland, whose flight from Burbank, Calif. was canceled, rescheduled and delayed several times Sunday.
Following Southwest Airline's hectic weekend amid thousands of flight cancellations, some Spokane International Airport passengers still found themselves facing delays on Monday.
"I'm still going to fly with them when I go home," said Evan Zimmerman, a software developer who flew in on a business trip to Spokane aboard a flight delayed about an hour Monday morning. "It hasn't really changed my opinion."
In Spokane's airport, some arriving and departing flights were delayed Monday. One coming from Oakland, Calif. was delayed an hour and a half, another from Las Vegas, Nev. was also postponed an hour and 40 minutes. On Monday, no cancellations had happened as of 4 p.m., according to the airport's flight tracker page.
The airline as of noon Monday canceled 10% of its scheduled flights for the day, over 360. Nearly 1,500 faced delays, or 41% of Southwest's schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware.
That's an improvement from the weekend when Southwest canceled 800 flights Saturday — 24% of its schedule. Another 1,000 were canceled Sunday, 30% of the airline's flights for the day.
Some rumors floated that pilots and attendants were protesting Southwest's company-wide COVID-19 vaccine mandate, but the Dallas-based airline said in a statement Monday employee demonstrators had not caused the delays.
"The employees there got blindsided as much as the travelers did," Holland said.
Southwest offered customers a "tremendous apology" in a statement issued Monday that blamed bad weather, air traffic controller issues and "other external constraints" causing cancellations on Friday.
More than 100 planes and crew members "weren't where they were supposed to be" on Friday night, Mike Van de Ven, Southwest's president and chief operating officer, told USA Today on Monday afternoon.
"Unfortunately, the out-of-place aircraft and continued strain on our crew resources created additional cancellations across our point-to-point network that cascaded throughout the weekend and into Monday," Southwest said in its statement.
Some pilots said the delays and cancellations came from management's "poor planning," according to a statement Monday from the Southwest Airline Pilots Association.