On Wednesday, the airline said it canceled 317 flights, though about two-thirds of the 3,100 flights that took off left within 30 minutes of their scheduled departure time. About 300 flights were scrapped after Delta Air Lines Inc. struggled to restart its worldwide operations after a computer failure halted flights for hours and grounded thousands of passengers. On Tuesday, about 800 flights were canceled, less than the 1,000 flights canceled Monday.
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Flight cancellations and delays are still plaguing the airline.
Delta’s senior vice president of operations, Dave Holtz, said in a written statement that the airline is “still operating in recovery mode”.
The airline hopes to have service returned to normal by Wednesday afternoon, though.
A total of 15 flights were canceled at LaGuardia Airport and 49 were delayed.
“We haven’t been affected here because Skywest handles all the flights from Cody to Salt Lake”, YRA manager Bob Hooper said.
The company also said about 90 cancellations were expected at the beginning of Wednesday, and normal operations would resume later.
Delta extended its offer of compensation to affected passengers to noon Wednesday and gave them until August 21 to rebook flights without paying a change fee. A power outage at its base in Atlanta affected its global computer systems.
Delta offered $200 travel vouchers for passengers with flights that were canceled or delayed by more than three hours.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said over the past three years the company had invested “hundreds of millions of dollars in technology infrastructure upgrades and systems, including backup systems to prevent what happened yesterday from occurring”.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx’s office said the government was talking to Delta about technical issues surrounding the outage but gave no specifics.
Delta’s chief operating officer, Gil West, said in a written statement Tuesday that some of the airline’s systems are still unstable, including slowness in systems used to check customers in, conduct boarding and dispatch planes.
Last month at Southwest, computers were restored after about 12 hours but flights continued to be canceled or delayed for several days as the carrier worked to get crews and planes in the right locations.
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RESCHEDULE YOUR FLIGHT: Delta won’t charge its ticket change fee, which can run as high as $500, even if your flight was not canceled. Industry analysts are also criticizing United States number 2 airline, in terms of traffic, by saying that it should upgrade its system to minimize the reliability on automation.
