Thousands of canceled flights cap holiday weekend of travel nightmares

Thousands of travelers were stranded at US airports Monday as a wave of canceled flights — many of them operated by Southwest — spoiled holiday plans and kept families from returning home during one of the busiest and most stressful travel stretches of the year. The cancellations and delays one day after Christmas left people sleeping on airport floors, standing in hourslong customer service lines and waiting on tarmacs for hours on end. The problems are likely to continue into Tuesday and later this week. As of Monday night, more than 1,700 US flights scheduled for Tuesday were already canceled, including 40% of all Southwest flights. “The only thing we want is to get home,” said Francis Uba, who was among the frustrated passengers at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on Monday, where over 130 flights were canceled as of that evening. He and his family returned from an eight-day cruise in the Bahamas on Monday to learn that their Southwest flight back home to Columbus, Ohio, had been canceled. Uba, 60, said the airline had rebooked them onto a Wednesday flight with no explanation. Uba, who owns a health business, said he had spent five hours trying to find another flight but had not even been able to reach an airline customer service agent and was considering renting a car in order to get back to work. More than 3,700 flights in the United States — including international flights into or out of the country — had been canceled as of Monday evening and more than 6,800 others had been delayed, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. Southwest was by far the most disrupted airline, with about 2,800 canceled flights, nearly 70% of its total flights, FlightAware showed. Chris Perry, a spokesman for Southwest, said that the airline was “experiencing disruptions across our network” as a result of the winter storms.<br/>