After a long weekend of winter weather that wreaked havoc on travelers’ plans, flight cancellations continued in Chicago on Tuesday, driven largely by Southwest Airlines — and the carrier expected disruptions to continue into the coming days.

By about 5 p.m., Southwest had canceled 246 flights out of Midway Airport, accounting for every Midway cancellation but one. The carrier was also responsible for 42 of the 78 cancellations Tuesday at O’Hare International Airport, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.

The Chicago cancellations were part of a broader meltdown at Dallas-based Southwest, as other airlines began to recover from a winter storm over the holiday weekend that left thousands of flights on many airlines canceled. Southwest canceled more than 2,600 flights systemwide Tuesday, a sign of problems the pilots union attributed to scheduling technology that couldn’t keep up with the airline’s complex flight network once weather-related cancellations started rolling in.

The Southwest disruptions were expected to continue into the coming days, as the carrier said Monday it would fly about one-third of its schedule for “the next several days.” Southwest has already canceled more than 200 flights scheduled for Wednesday at Midway, according to FlightAware, leaving thousands of travelers stranded and scenes of chaos at the airport.

Gina Collier, traveling with her husband and mother-in-law, was eager to spend Christmas with her grandchildren in Florida. But their Dec. 23 flight to Tampa was canceled and, after hours of delays, another flight later that evening was also canceled.

Collier said she spent her Christmas weekend calling Southwest, but was unable to rebook. Then, they learned their luggage would be heading to Florida without them.

“Yesterday, I was so angry, I couldn’t get out of bed,” she said. “I was just angry. We missed Christmas with our grandkids. We can’t get our luggage.”

Reports of problems retrieving checked bags were widespread. Dozens of suitcases were lined up Tuesday morning at the Midway Airport baggage claim, their printed labels indicating they came from destinations such as Sarasota, Florida; Pittsburgh; and El Paso, Texas.

A line of passengers waited to be permitted into the area, about two at a time, to try to find their luggage. Searchers looked for their bags for 30 or 45 minutes. Periodically, applause would break out from onlookers when someone finally found a bag.

One passenger asked if there was a system for ensuring bags were going to the right person. A worker replied the luggage should be there, “unless someone walked away with it.”

The Chicago Department of Aviation said there were no issues specific to Midway that were contributing to cancellations or delays Tuesday. Two gates were unusable during the winter storm days earlier — one because of an electrical wiring issue, and the other because of a door motor issue — but neither contributed “significantly” to delays or cancellations, and both gates were back online by Monday, spokesman Kevin Bargnes said.

Department of Aviation employees were being sent to Midway ticketing counters and the baggage claim area this week to provide extra customer service help, he said.

The Southwest cancellations drew the attention of federal authorities. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced Monday evening it was looking at the “unacceptable” level of disruption for Southwest customers and that it sought to ensure the airline was sticking to its obligations to stranded customers.

They also got the attention of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who said on Twitter Tuesday he was following the cancellations and had spoken with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

“Southwest Airlines should take immediate action to assist all those that are stranded and waiting endless hours for their flights,” Pritzker said. “All travelers must be compensated for invaluable loss of time this holiday season, on top of compensation for rescheduled flights, hotels and alternative transportation. I also urge the leadership of Southwest to be proactive in communicating openly and honestly with their customers about the rebooking of future flights and what the airline will be able to handle in the days and weeks ahead.”

The union that represents the airline’s pilots, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, attributed the continued cancellations largely to the airline’s scheduling technology.

As the weather worsened, the technology couldn’t keep track of pilots, flight attendants or planes, said Mike Santoro, vice president of the association, which is in negotiations with Southwest over a new contract.

Southwest flies a point-to-point network, meaning that crews can be scheduled to fly, for example, from an East Coast city to the Midwest and on to the Rocky Mountains or the West Coast, rather than flying in and out of a major hub city under a hub-and-spoke system.

The system has benefits, but in this case it meant that crews and planes were out of place and couldn’t easily pick the schedule back up when the weather cleared, Santoro said. Then the scheduling technology lost track of them.

“When things happen on a larger scale like what happened earlier last week with the storm, it just snowballed,” Santoro said. “And then it snowballed pretty much out of control. No one could keep track of where we were.”

Industry analyst Robert Mann said the scheduling technology issue was the last in a series of events that contributed to the cancellations, including increasing reliance on mandatory overtime for staffers to meet the flight schedule.

“I think some of this was a self-created problem,” he said. “It’s an own goal, in World Cup terms.”

Moving airplanes back into the right place can be done in a few days, Mann said. The problem for customers will be finding space on increasingly full flights, especially when only a fraction of those flights are expected to be operating for the next several days.

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In a video posted online Tuesday evening, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan apologized to customers and employees. He said that after trying to fly a full schedule across the holiday weekend, executives decided to cut flying in the coming days to try to catch up and get people and airplanes back into place.

The airline’s tools mostly work, he said, but “clearly we need to double down on our already existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances so that we never again face what’s happening right now.”

”We’re optimistic to be back on track before next week,” he said. “We have some real work to do in making this right.”

At Midway, next to the line to claim suitcases, another long line stretched to Southwest’s baggage services. A blowup Grinch stood in front of the desk, greeting customers eager to know when they could catch another flight or where their bags were, in what seemed to be a representation of the dampened holiday spirit of many travelers. The desk was covered in fabric with the Grinch’s face splashed across it.

Kimberly Day and her two children got stranded in Chicago while trying to fly from Phoenix to upstate New York to see a sick family member in hospice, “with only a few days left,” she said.

Day, who is five months pregnant, and her kids, ages 7 and 5, arrived in Chicago Monday. Southwest canceled their flight to Albany and rebooked them for Tuesday, then later canceled the Tuesday flight.

She said Southwest has now told her family the first opening for a flight to New York is Friday. To fly back home to Phoenix, they were told they will have to wait until Jan. 2, she said.

Amtrak was full and rental cars were hard to come by, she said. Rebooking on another airline could cost more than $1,000 per ticket. And Southwest’s customer service phone system was down, she said.

Her dad was visiting family in Ohio, and began making a five-hour drive to Chicago to figure out next steps. But now she can’t retrieve her family’s luggage, she said, after Southwest employees told her it would be flown to Albany without them.

She said Southwest employees were doing the best they could, but she was frustrated the airline let the family fly into Chicago at all. Neither she nor her daughters, who were dressed in sweatpants and red long-sleeved Christmas shirts, have coats or winter attire as the city recovers from a sharp cold spell.

“I would have preferred to have been canceled in Phoenix and then been home,” Day said. “Now, we’re just stuck here for five days in a city that I know no one, nothing.”

Other travelers also said they were struggling to rebook their travel, whether by plane, train or car. Long lines snaked through a Hertz rental car location in the Loop.

The holiday season is always busy for Hertz, but the rental car agency is seeing a surge in demand for car rentals nationwide and in Chicago because of the recent winter storms and flight cancellations, spokesman Jonathan Stern said.

“On Monday, our U.S. Contact Center experienced record call volume, and we continue to see sustained demand for bookings, reservation modifications and one-way rentals,” he said in a statement.

Collier, who missed Christmas with her grandkids, returned to Midway Monday for an update and found people sleeping at the airport. Tuesday, she came back with a rainbow-colored bag filled with snacks and other necessities to give out.

Jeff Cesario’s flight to visit family in New Orleans was canceled, he said. He wasn’t able to get his luggage or get hold of Southwest by phone.

He had been anticipating the trip for weeks, but decided not to try to rebook his flight. Instead, he would stay home in the south suburbs.

“I just want to get my bags and go home,” he said.

Chicago Tribune reporter Alice Yin and The Associated Press contributed.

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