Some financial facts that help explain the situation: over the past 10 years US airlines have spent about 95% of their free cash flows on stock buybacks. This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems. Why do they care so much about their stock price over long term sustainability? In 2020, Southwest lost 3.1 billion dollars and took 6 billions of government money, but executives increased their own compensation by 5% to 14% and the CEO paid himself 9 millions dollars, of which 7 millions were in stock.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/bailout-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/04/09/pay-...