Southwest Airlines will fly one-third of its scheduled flights this week, and customers are furious

Southwest passengers (Credit: Eugene Garcia—AP Images)

While flight cancelations and delays due to winter storms affected all the major American airlines over Christmas weekend, the misery continued for one group of passengers in particular on Monday and Tuesday. More than 3,000 flights across the U.S. had been canceled Tuesday afternoon and most—some 85 percent—of those scrubbed flights were those of Southwest Airlines.

The low-cost airline had posted 2,613 cancellations as of 5pm, nearly two-thirds of its carrier flights, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, delays, and cancelations. This was a dramatically worse showing than its rivals American Airlines, United, Delta and JetBlue, which had cancellation rates of 2 percent or less on Tuesday. Spirit Airlines had canceled 11 percent of its flights.