Southwest Airlines says it expects normal operations on Friday after thousands of cancellations

Southwest Airlines confirmed connected Thursday that it expects to "return to mean operations with minimal disruptions" connected Friday aft the carrier's systemwide meltdown stranded hundreds of thousands of customers implicit the Christmas vacation week and drew scrutiny from Washington.

The bearer cancelled 39 flights scheduled for Friday, according to FlightAware, down from much than 2,300 Thursday.

The low-cost hose slashed formation schedules implicit the past respective days, flying conscionable astir one-third of its planned flights, successful an hopeless effort to stabilize its operation, getting planes and crews wherever they needed to go.

"With different vacation play afloat of important connections for our valued Customers and Employees, we are anxious to instrumentality to a authorities of normalcy," it said connected its website.

Southwest's cognition unraveled implicit the vacation week aft brutal wintertime upwind swept crossed the U.S. When astir airlines had recovered astatine the extremity of past week, Southwest's problems worsened. Executives cited challenges including overloaded interior scheduling platforms important to getting crews matched with flights.

"We person overmuch enactment up of us, including investing successful caller solutions to negociate wide-scale disruptions," Southwest said successful its statement.

The airline's banal has dropped much than 7% week to date.

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