Southwest Airlines will extend cancellations of Boeing 737 Max flights until mid-April, the

company said Tuesday, amid ongoing uncertainty about when the aircraft will be allowed to
return to service.

Customers who have booked these flights will be notified and reassigned to other planes.
Last week, American Airlines extended its 737 Max cancellations until early April, after the
Federal Aviation Administration said it wouldn’t approve the aircraft’s return for the
remainder of 2019.

The 737 Max has been grounded worldwide since March and under scrutiny following two crashes
within five months that killed 346 people. Since the grounding, Boeing has continued producing the
jets at a cost of $1.5 billion each month, in hopes the FAA would sign off on their return to use. But
Boeing announced Wednesday that it was halting production on the 737 Max indefinitely starting in
January.

A Southwest spokesman said the decision to extend the Max cancellation was unrelated to
Boeing halting production of the jetliner, as the airline has been evaluating the situation on a
rolling 30-day basis.

While other airlines turned toward the hub-and-spoke model, Southwest went down the path
of trying to build a higher capacity bus service between major cities, and the range and fuel
efficiency of the 737 allowed them to do that in a way they probably wouldn’t have been able
to with prior aircrafts,” Vernon said. “Their business was kind of invented by the 737 family
of aircraft.”