Delta Air Lines has announced it anticipates a return to “normal operation” by Wednesday afternoon after the company was forced to cancel thousands of flights earlier in the week following a power outage on Monday morning.
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The airline said it canceled 317 flights Wednesday, though about two-thirds of the 3,100 flights that took off left within 30 minutes of their scheduled departure time.
Delta previously said it expected fewer than 100 flights to be Wednesday, but that estimate ultimately proved too conservative.
Since Monday the problems have built up throughout the day, as canceled flights reached about 800 by the end of the day Tuesday, on top of about 1,000 cancellations on Monday. The system moved to backup power but not all of the servers were connected to that source, which caused the cascading problem.
The company said when flight crews can not carry out their responsibilities in a rotation, the rotations become invalid. “Delta agents today are using the original interface we designed for this system while we continue with our resetting efforts”.
Analysts expect passenger refunds, overtime hours for workers and other costs will reduce Delta’s profit this quarter.
Q: You and other Delta executives have been touting the airline’s impressive record of days without cancelations.
In the past year, rivals Southwest Airlines Co and American Airlines Group Inc have also suffered flight disruptions due to data system malfunctions.
Passengers traveling on Delta are being advised to check the status of their flight on either http://www.Delta.com or the Fly Delta App. In the long-run, our customers are going to look at who we are and what we provide. As a bonus, Delta is giving away $200 in travel vouchers to those whose flight was canceled or delayed more than three hours.
Delta extended until Wednesday a travel-waiver policy to help stranded passengers rearrange their travel plans.
“We just don’t have a number for a specific region”, he said.
It was initially assumed a Georgia Power outage started the chain of events, but Bastian said that’s not the case. While this has been an unfortunate week – and it’s been a week we’ve been very sorry about, we’ve learned a lot about – I see no continuing effect in terms of the quality and reliability of the product we’ll be putting forth in the future.
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“You’ve got these big systems and maintaining them is kind of like maintaining an aircraft in flight because they can’t go down”, Peri said.
