Delta is providing 0 travel vouchers to its customers who either had their flights delayed for more than three hours or who had their flights canceled as a result of an outage on Monday or Tuesday.
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The company would start operations with a little more than 150 cancellations on Wednesday after roughly 800 flights were canceled on Tuesday.
“We are still operating in recovery mode”, Dave Holtz, senior vice president of operations, said Tuesday. Delta Air Lines delayed or canceled hundreds of flights Monday after its computer systems crashed, stranding thousands of pe. Their computers are back up and running, but they’re still dealing with several issues, including finding for the tens of thousands of passengers whose flights were cancelled on Monday.
Delta offered a travel-waiver policy to help stranded passengers rearrange their travel plans.
In a video posted on the airline’s website, CEO Ed Bastian said Delta probably will have cancelations and delays Wednesday too, although he didn’t give numbers.
According to the specialized website flightradar24.com Delta Airlines flew a total of more than 830 aircraft.
Airlines have been putting more people in each plane, so when a system of a major carrier crashes, as has happened with others before Delta, finding a new seat for the waylaid becomes more hard. Last month, the average Delta flight was 87 percent full. Key systems and equipment then did not switch over to backups. ‘I don’t have the final analysis for what caused the outage.
Such incidents show that computer and power systems for huge operations like airlines are “as important, or more important, as our bridges and other physical infrastructure that need to be constantly upgraded and maintained”, said Ramnath Chellappa, an Emory University business professor. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays, the Associated Press reported. Over those two days, more than 1,200 Delta flights around the world were canceled due to a power outage that crippled its booking and communications systems.
Industry consultants say airlines face an increasing risk from computer disruptions as they automate more of their operations, distribute boarding passes on smartphones and fit their planes with Wi-Fi. Others took it in stride.
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Their system slowly started to come back up, but it was not fast enough to get passengers to their destinations. “It is a shame that the airlines are forcing people to use their online systems more (by charging for certain bookings over the phone and having long waiting times) and as long as this is the trend, there will always be big problems with things like this”, travel expert Charles Barkowski told Digital Trends.
