“We are still operating in recovery mode”, Delta, the No.2 USA airline by passenger traffic, said on Tuesday.
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That includes more flights at Dayton International Airport.
The company said it would start operations with a little more than 150 cancellations today, Wednesday, Aug. 10, after roughly 800 flights were canceled on Tuesday.
The airline said it suffered a power outage at an Atlanta installation around 2:30 a.m. EDT that caused many of its computer systems to fail.
“We continue to ask our customers to check their travel plans and flight status”.
By late afternoon Tuesday, the airline said it had canceled 680 flights as it moved planes and crews to “reset” its operation. They also provided $200 travel vouchers to all customers who experienced at least a three-hour flight delay or cancellation.
Delta extended fee waivers and other offers that it made to passengers on Monday and provided thousands of hotel vouchers at its major hubs.
Delta ran almost 900,000 flights in 2015, making it the second-busiest U.S. airline.
“Delta employees have been working around the clock and are committed to bringing the airline back to full strength”, Delta Senior Vice President Bill Lentsch said in the release. A little over an hour later, the airline lifted the ground stop and resumed with some departures, but passengers were advised to still prepare for continuing cancellations and delays. The outage and extensive cancellations forced Delta CEO Ed Bastian to apologize to customers.
The answer is that airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complex IT systems to do just about everything, from operating flights to handling ticketing, boarding, websites and mobile-phone apps.
Delta is based in Atlanta. Early Monday, when a power control module at Delta’s technology command center failed and caught fire, it caused a surge to a Georgia Power transformer and a loss of power.
When other servers that were connected to dual power sources came back on, he said, “they did not get responses from the 300 servers…”
While Delta made further accommodations to inconvenienced passengers as the week progressed, Charlie Leocha, chairman and co-founder of Travelers United, a passenger advocacy group, said the airline still could do more to make its customers whole.
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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.
