An airline operations system, controller and method reschedules flights affected by a disruption that precludes a planned schedule for the flights. The method includes obtaining data related to a scheduled origination and a scheduled destination for each of a set of passengers scheduled on the flights, generating a passenger connection network of connections between the scheduled origination and the scheduled destination for a subset of the set of passengers, applying at least one criterion to the passenger connection network and rescheduling at least one connecting flight based on the criteria. The system and controller solves a network flow problem to reschedule a subset of connecting flights to have a delayed projected departure time. Resulting output can include the set of delayed flights along with modified projected departure times, a set of flight cancellations and a set of passengers with missed connections.