Its main challenge will be to find sufficient seats on planes during the busy summer holiday season for tens of thousands of passengers whose flights were cancelled. The disruptions yesterday follow about 1,000 cancelled flights Monday and, according to FlightStats, about 2,800 delayed flights, after an outage at Delta’s Atlanta headquarters instigated a global meltdown of its booking and communications systems.
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On Monday in Richmond, Virginia, Delta gate agents were writing out boarding passes by hand.
Industry experts have begun linking airline computer system failures to corporate mergers that require integrating older computer systems from rival companies into a single, expanded system operated by the new corporation.
More pain awaits passengers as Delta struggles to restore service, the second reminder in less than a month that America’s air transportation avenues are dependent on computerized systems that can fail when a single piece of hardware doesn’t do its job. When that happens, the system is created to switch in the blink of an eye to backup computer systems.
Delta offered refunds and $200 in travel vouchers to people whose flights were either canceled or delayed at least three hours.
Southwest Airlines experienced a similar situation last months; they suffered intermittent computer problems over several days and had to cancel hundreds of flights. Even brief outages can snarl traffic.
Delta’s system, called Deltamatic, started as a joint venture with Northwest and TWA in the 1990s. A power outage in Atlanta caused a cascading meltdown, the Atlanta-based airline said.
“These systems – which run everything from flight dispatching to crew scheduling, passenger check-in, airport-departure information displays, ticket sales and frequent-flier programs – gradually have been updated but are still vulnerable, IT experts said”.
“I had about four different notifications that my flight was pushed out, pushed out, pushed out and then at midnight I got the notification that it was cancelled”, Milan said.
Cancellations that were the result of a computer outage lingered into Tuesday. The airline was able to get flights from Europe and Asia back on track and also was able to maintain its mobile app and website functionality.
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MSP Airport typically sees 1,027 commercial flights daily – roughly 80 percent are Delta flights, Meet Minneapolis says. We lost power about 2:30 this morning, which caused us to implement the ground stop that we put in place at five.
