Thousands of flights canceled and delayed in the US due to winter storm 3:38
(CNN) --
Southwest Airlines says it will resume normal programming Friday after a tumultuous eight days that left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded or with delayed flights and prompted executives to apologize to travelers and government officials.
In a statement issued Thursday — after another painful day that saw another 2,350 flights canceled — Southwest said it expected minimal disruption over New Year's weekend.
"We are encouraged by the progress we have made in reorganizing the crew, their schedules and our fleet," he said.
Thursday's statement came with further obligations on the part of the airline.
Southwest Airlines Continues to Cancel US Flights as the New Year Approaches
"We know that even our deepest apologies, to our customers, to our employees and to everyone affected by this outage, only go so far," the statement read.
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"We have created a page at southwest.com/traveldisruption for customers to submit requests for refunds and returns for meals, hotels and alternative transportation, as well as to connect customers with their luggage."
However, that still doesn't allay questions about how the airline's systems can allow things to go so wrong and demand that they never happen again.
And the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) continues to hold a firm line with Southwest.
Department of Transportation calls for doing the right thing for passengers
The Transportation Department formally warned Southwest Airlines Thursday that it will face consequences if it fails to do the right thing with stranded and inconvenienced passengers.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wrote in a letter to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan that officials will take action against the airline if it fails to follow through on its promises to reimburse passengers for alternative transportation costs, as well as provide meals, hotels, refunds and baggage reunification.
Stranded Southwest Airlines passengers search for their luggage in the baggage claim area at Chicago Midway International Airport on December 28, 2022. (Credit: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Sanctions include the possibility of imposing fines.
"It would be an unfair and deceptive practice to fail to honor this commitment to passengers," Buttigieg wrote, referring specifically to alternative travel refunds.
"The Department will use the full extent of its investigative and enforcement powers to hold Southwest accountable if it fails to honor promises made to reimburse passengers for costs incurred for rerouting."
Those fines could be substantial.
"The airline told me they were going to go above and beyond what was required of them," Buttigieg said Thursday in an interview with NBC News.
"I'm trying to make sure they actually do, and if they don't, we're in a position to levy tens of thousands of dollars per violation per passenger in fines."
Friday's cancellation list is much longer
FlightAware, the flight tracking service, showed that only 39 Southwest flights on Friday have been canceled as of 9:00 p.m. ET on Thursday.
That seems to support Southwest's claim that normal services would resume around Friday.
The airline has also begun notifying its customers that it expects to have a "full schedule" on Friday.
An email to a passenger who was scheduled to fly Southwest on Friday said: "While we have recently experienced operational challenges, we look forward to resuming a full flight schedule with minimal disruption to your travel day."
Why did Southwest Airlines collapse?
If you ask Southwest Airlines employees about their company's technology, one word keeps coming up: "outdated."
While Southwest has grown from a Texas-based low-cost airline operating three planes to one of the largest in the country, union officials representing Southwest workers say the company has not kept pace with technological changes. .
And they say they have been raising concerns for years.
"We've been insisting on them since 2015 every year," Mike Santoro, a captain and vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told CNN.
A large amount of unclaimed baggage is seen in the Southwest Airlines baggage center at Midway Airport on December 27, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.
(Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
But as extreme winter conditions ripped through much of the country last week, including major airports in Southwest's network, the airline's plan to return to "irregular operations" has reached its limits, according to several people familiar with the situation.
They and the airline itself described an internal process that requires various departments to manually redesign the airline's schedule, a system that works "the vast majority of the time," the airline said in a statement.
This is how Southwest failed on the holidays: 4 graphs that explain the flight cancellations
“The magnitude and scale of this disruption put a strain on our technology and processes, forcing a significant amount of processing to be done manually,” Southwest said.
“Our staff have been there in every way throughout this challenge.”
When something goes wrong, Southwest's software, including the staffing system tool, leaves much of the work of rebuilding that delicate network to be done manually.
“You don't see the best way to fix anything when flights are cancelled,” said Brian Brown, president of Transportation Workers Union Local 550, which represents dispatchers and meteorologists for Southwest.
“It requires a lot more human intervention and human eyesight or brainpower and it can only handle a limited amount.”
The result is that airline officials "don't necessarily know where our crews are, where our planes are," Brown said.
Crew schedulers in another department are manually checking which pilots and flight attendants comply with strict federal rules on work hours, rules intended to prevent onboard safety professionals from becoming excessively tired.
What customers should do
Phil Dengler, co-founder of travel advice website The Vacationer, cautions against caution when it comes to refunds.
"Southwest says, 'We will honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel and alternate transportation,'" he said.
"Although Southwest is vague on how much they will reimburse, I would avoid expensive hotels or restaurants. Use Google Hotels to find hotels near the airport where you are stranded."
And it also warns against racking up a big account.
"Do some Google searches like 'free things to do near me'."
I doubt Southwest will reimburse tours or other paid activities, so I wouldn't book any expensive excursions that you can't afford."
Andy Rose, Andi Babineau, Adrienne Broaddus, Dave Alsap, Nick Valencia, Devon Sayers, David Goldman, Leslie Perrot, Carlos Suarez and CNN's Ross Levitt contributed to this story.
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