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It's December 2022 in Denver.

A wave of frigid Arctic air crashes into the rocky mountains and cascades down onto the great plains.

Out on the vast expanse of Denver International Airport, winds gusts up to 60 miles per hour.

At Southwest Airlines gates, shivering ramp agents work through the

cold, loading planes with bags and fuel, even as their hands go numb. A worker perched in the cherry

picker uses a hose to blast the planes with hot de-icing fluid. The process is slow going. And as some Southwest planes wait their turn,

they're getting stuck on the ground. Literally, plane tires are freezing to the tarmac. By midnight,

when wind chills have nosedive to 40 below zero, Southwest and other airlines have delayed 700 flights and canceled nearly 200.

And the worst is yet to come.

The storm's freezing air blows from the Rockies to the Atlantic, snarling traffic across much of the country.

It's a rapidly intensifying weather system known as a bomb cyclone. The storm has blown up operations

in two of Southwest's most important cities, Denver and Chicago. A quarter of the airline's flight

crews are based in those spots. That's having a devastating ripple effect on the rest of Southwest's

flight network. On Christmas Eve, three days after the storm first hit, the airline cancels almost

40% of its flights. Christmas Day isn't looking any merrier.

Other airlines are recovering from the impact of the storm, but Southwest isn't. To get its planes back in the air,

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan has brought all hands on deck inside Southwest's network operations center

at its Dallas headquarters. The facility, which everyone at Southwest calls the knock after its initials,

NOC,

resembles NASA's mission control.

...