A youth baseball team headed for a game in St. Louis was among the hundreds of passengers left stranded at LAX Thursday morning amid a growing number of Southwest Airlines flight delays and cancelations.
About 45 people, including coaches and parents, were traveling with the West Covina team of 8-year-old and under players.
The team was traveling to St. Louis to take part in a national baseball tournament, but the kids – several still wearing their uniforms — ended up sleeping on the airport floor and chairs instead.
One parent said they were hoping to board an 8 a.m. flight, but that didn’t happen either and now they are worried they will miss their game scheduled for this afternoon.
The trouble began when Southwest suffered an hour-long “system outage” Wednesday night, which led to a nationwide ground stop for all of their flights.
The airline ended up canceling nearly 700 flights Wednesday due to the technical issues, a statement from the company stated Thursday.
“Most” of the systems were back online Thursday morning, but another 300 flights had to be canceled to manage lingering flight disruptions across the system, according to the statement.
“I want to start off by once again apologizing to our Customers and reiterating that your experience throughout the past 24 hours is not the service you should expect from Southwest Airlines,” an earlier statement read.
The statement also said the company would work with “every affected customer” to make things right.
