Konstance Woods talks on her cell phone with an agent as she stands in line at the Delta ticketing counter at Washington’s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Monday, Aug. 8, 2016. By early afternoon, Delta said it had canceled about 530 flights as it moved planes and crews to ¿reset¿ its operation. MSP is the airline’s second-biggest hub after its Atlanta home base.
Advertisement
Last month, it took Southwest days to recover from a breakdown it blamed on a faulty router. In addition, thousands of flights were also delayed and passengers have been stranded all over the world. They say the Monday morning outage caused more than 1,000 flight cancelations and delayed another 3,000.
“This isn’t who we are”, Bastian said on the video.
“It’s really frustrating”, said Tatjana Drachenberg, a traveler from Germany whose flight to Atlanta was delayed five hours, causing her to miss her connecting flight to Charleston, S.C. She arrived Monday evening at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and “pretty much slept on the floor, got hardly any sleep”.
Delta is waiving certain change fees for customers who were scheduled to travel Monday or Tuesday and want to change their travel plans to later in the week. At San Francisco’s airport, the line for limited Delta flights Tuesday stretched from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. As they did, they noticed a few stranded passengers curled up on the floor. “If in fact, Delta on a long-term basis, continues to be more reliable than those other airlines”, said Kaplan.
A power outage at an Atlanta facility at around 2:30 a.m. local time initiated a cascading meltdown, according to the airline, which is also based in Atlanta.
USA carriers experienced technical disruptions to flights late past year and early in 2016, including a connectivity flaw at American Airlines that halted flights at its Chicago, Dallas and Miami hubs in September and a reservations-system glitch at Southwest in October. The airline is juggling legal restrictions on how long flight crews can be on duty without rest with rescheduling rotations of flight crews, it added. It sometimes resorts to extraordinary steps, such as having an worldwide flight make an interim stop to pick up a crew, to keep from canceling a flight.
Such incidents show that computer and power systems for huge operations like airlines are “as important, or more important, as our bridges and other physical infrastructure that need to be constantly upgraded and maintained”, said Ramnath Chellappa, an Emory University business professor.
Advertisement
“Delta has been so confident that it is as good at this as anybody that it took everything back in-house”, said Seth Kaplan, co-author of a book about Delta’s rise from bankruptcy to prominence in the industry.
