You can't give people free flights if you don't know where your planes and crews are and don't know where to tell your angry customers to go. There are also laws to adhere to, there is a maximum amount of time a flight crew can work so if you tell them to "just fly if you can and we'll figure it out later" you're probably going to break a lot of laws and endanger a lot of passengers.

I think they probably are trying to jerry-rig a system, but the airline industry is heavily regulated for safety reasons (a good idea that has been extremely successful), so it's very difficult to get a plane in the air if you don't know what the fuck you're doing.