Southwest Airlines has canceled all its Tuesday flights into and out of Bellingham International Airport (BLI), in keeping with a nationwide series of cancellations as the airline struggles to recover following last week’s winter storm.
As of Tuesday afternoon, all four scheduled Southwest flights — two arrivals and two departures — were canceled, according to flight information from BLI.
While most airlines have largely resumed normal operations after a massive winter storm forced thousands of flights to be canceled across the country, Southwest’s recovery has lagged behind due to its inability to get crews and airplanes to their scheduled flights, according to reporting from the Associated Press. More than 60% of the airline’s flights were canceled Tuesday, AP said.
“The recent and unfortunate service disruptions, delays and cancellations by Southwest Airlines have impacted Christmas travelers, the airline’s employees and service airports due to an unavoidable convergence of events caused by the massive once-in-a-50-year winter storm,” Sunil Harman, director of aviation at Bellingham International Airport, said in an email.
A line for baggage check snakes through the usually quiet Bellingham International Airport following a delayed Southwest Airlines flight on Dec. 22. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
The storm caused “cascading disruptions” leading to “a near system-wide gridlock,” Harman added. For example, Harman said, a Tuesday flight from BLI to Las Vegas experienced a mechanical failure that forced passengers to disembark.
“By the time repairs were completed, the crew had timed out resulting in the flight being canceled. Similar types of situations were occurring throughout the network,” he said. Crew members “time out” when they exhaust the maximum number of hours they are legally allowed to work.
Because of the national scale of the problem, Harman said it’s hard to predict how long cancellations will persist at BLI, but he expects it may take several days before full service is restored. He recommended that affected customers contact the airline for refunds.
“Locally, the airline has been very proactive in advising passengers of service disruption, and we have not seen passengers or luggage stranded,” Harman said. “Most of the customers who experienced storm disruptions to and from BLI have been accommodated by rebooking or alternative transport to/from [Seattle-Tacoma International Airport].”
