SkyWest Inc., the largest U.S. regional airline, suffered “an internal technical issue” Thursday that forced 1,200 flight cancellations as jets and crews that were in the wrong places caused operational woes for a second day.
A “server outage” caused the problems but was resolved on Thursday evening, SkyWest spokesperson Marissa Snow said Friday in an emailed statement. The airline expected around 500 canceled flights Friday, atop 700 on Thursday.
SkyWest operates regional jet flights for American Airlines Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and Alaska Air Group Inc., with United its largest customer in terms of daily departures.
The carrier, based in St. George, Utah, has canceled nearly 470 flights so far on Friday, or about 18% of its schedule, according to FlightAware, an aviation data service. SkyWest has more than 2,300 daily flights in 236 cities and a fleet of about 480 aircraft.
“We apologize to customers for the inconvenience and remain focused on efforts to return to normal operations as quickly as possible,” SkyWest said.
The cancellations affected about 400 Delta flights and 106 Alaska flights, according to spokespeople for each airline.
American Airlines said the SkyWest outage resulted in about 170 cancellations Thursday and 60 Friday on its network.
