TAMPA, Fla. — If you’re planning on flying out of Tampa International Airport Tuesday and hitching a ride on a Southwest Airlines flight, you should check your flight status before heading to the airport.
TPA is still seeing an impact on Southwest flights after the airline asked the Federal Aviation Administration to briefly “pause” all of its departures due to “intermittent technology issues.” Within 30 minutes of the FAA tweeting about the pause, the government organization sent out an update saying the pause had been lifted.
“This morning @SouthwestAir experienced a technical issue with one of their internal systems,” the FAA tweeted. “At the airline’s request, the FAA paused Southwest’s departures as they resolved the issue. The pause has been lifted and their service has resumed.”
Still, it would seem the damage is already done, at least to some degree. According to flight tracking website FlightAware, more than 1,700 Southwest flights have been delayed nationwide, as of 11:25 a.m. Eastern. That accounts for more than 40% of Southwest’s Tuesday schedule, according to FlightAware.
Locally, TPA’s website shows about at least a dozen Southwest flights have been delayed or rescheduled. When the ground stop was first reported, the airport asked people on Twitter to check with Southwest directly about their flight status.
“Technical errors are unexpected an inconvenient for all, and you have our sincere apologies,” Southwest’s official Twitter account responded in a tweet about the nationwide ground stop.
It's not yet known what's the cause of Tuesday's issues, and the airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other airlines do not appear to be impacted.
Back in December, Southwest Airlines suffered a massive breakdown that led to the cancelation of nearly 17,000 flights in 10 days before resuming a normal schedule. Last month, Southwest's CEO again pushed back against the view that those issues were caused by a failure to invest enough money in crew-scheduling technology, instead blaming extremely cold weather that forced it to stop flying at some airports.
Southwest said in a filing that it continues to expect to report a loss for the first quarter, with lingering fallout from the December crisis cutting revenue by up to $350 million. That is on top of an $800 million drop in fourth-quarter pretax income that Southwest attributed to the meltdown, which is being investigated by federal officials.
TEGNA contributed to this report.