Southwest Airlines, caught in a vexing tangle of misplaced staff and technical problems since last week’s winter storm, said Thursday that it planned to return to normal operations on Friday.
More than 2,300 of Southwest’s flights were canceled on Thursday, or about 58 percent of the flights that it had scheduled for the day. But the airline had canceled just 39 flights scheduled for Friday as of Thursday afternoon.
“We know even our deepest apologies — to our customers, to our employees and to all affected through this disruption — only go so far,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.
The company’s problems started with a severe winter storm that disrupted every airline in the busy travel days before Christmas. But Southwest did not quickly bounce back like the rest of the industry, in large part because it relies on a different organizational structure that made it harder to recover from disruptions.
In addition, the company had technical problems in the computer systems it uses to schedule flights and crews.
