Additionally, those flight crews can only be on duty for a limited time before rest periods are required by law, with crews working in three or four day rotations. Almost 1,200 Delta flights had been delayed, according to tracking service FlightStats Inc.
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At Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday, passengers who had waited throughout the night for what was originally scheduled as an 11:15 p.m. flight to Atlanta starting booing after a 5 a.m. announcement that the flight could not take off until Delta found other pilots.
Delta Air Lines said it expects to return to normal operations on Wednesday after a power outage hit its computer systems on Monday, causing the cancellation of more than 1,600 flights over two days.
The airline has had to cancel over 1,700 flights since Monday, when a power outage at its base in Atlanta affected its global computer systems. Roughly 800 flights were cancelled on Monday alone, airline officials said.
Delta is also giving $200 in travel vouchers to those whose flights are canceled or whose flights are delayed more than three hours.
The company’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, for a second day created a video message on Delta’s website to describe the problem and to apologize.
It’s been more than 48 hours since Delta suffered a massive power outage that grounded all its planes Monday morning, but the travel nightmare isn’t over for some fliers. The network is supposed to instantly switch over to backup computer systems.
Skywest is the airline carrier out of Cody to Salt Lake City, Utah, and it has separate computer systems from Delta. Hundreds of other flights were delayed Wednesday.
The airline continued to advise passengers to check on the readiness of their flights online or using the company’s app.
But passengers whose trips are disrupted by delayed or canceled flights should know all their options.
It didn’t help that Delta wasn’t upfront telling passengers what happened.
The airline is waiving fees, offering refunds and giving out travel vouchers to those who were scheduled to fly on August 8 or August 9.
“Our crews have been on site this morning and we continue to work closely with the team at Delta as they work to fix the affected equipment”, Georgia Power said in the statement.
Travel experts advise affected passengers to claim a cash compensation instead of a voucher due to the validity date issue of the latter.
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“I’m sorry we let you down”. It was later spun off into a separate company called Travelport, but Delta bought back its portion two years ago.
