Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines was among those around the world hit by a tech outage on Friday affecting many Microsoft users.
But even after other airlines and companies recovered within about 24 hours or so, Delta’s operations went into a full-blown meltdown, with more than 5,000 flight cancellations over the last few days and hundreds more Monday, according to FlightAware.com.
On Sunday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian apologized in a letter to customers and gave an explanation of why his airline has been more severely affected than other companies and has struggled to recover.
He also explained that the airline still has not restored full functionality to its operation.
Bastian wrote that Delta has “a significant number of applications that use (the Microsoft Windows operating) system, and in particular one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown.”
“Our teams have been working around the clock to recover and restore full functionality,” Bastian wrote Sunday.
Often when an airline’s operations are disrupted by severe weather, the worst of the impacts are generally confined to one region or country. But here, Delta is encountering problems that have clipped the wings of its entire network.
Delta has struggled to get enough crew members to staff its flights, leading in many cases to delay after delay before a flight is ultimately canceled.
In some cases, the airline may get one or two crew members to the gate for a flight, only to have them wait hours for additional crew members and “time out,” or reach the limit for hours on duty.
When that happens and the flight is canceled, Delta loses the use of those crews, while the aircraft and crews don’t make it to the next city for their other flights for the day, and the problem snowballs — across hundreds of flights around the country and the world.
Under different circumstances, Southwest Airlines in December 2022 had a meltdown of its operations that started amid severe winter weather during the busy Christmas holiday travel period and worsened as days wore on due to problems with its crew scheduling software.
Passenger Shakim Tilley, who was at the airport for about 12 hours Friday with his wife and children through multiple delays before his flight was canceled, said Delta told passengers the delays were because they didn’t have the flight attendants needed to operate the flight.
“They kept delaying us because they said we didn’t have a flight crew,” Tilley said.
“I was trying to recruit flight attendants,” said Tilley’s wife Tiffany.
“The pilot sat on the airplane for 10 hours. He timed out,” Shakim Tilley said. “Finally we got our flight crew,” but because the pilot had timed out, “then they canceled the flight.”
While some companies that have to shut down operations for several hours can resume operations relatively smoothly afterward while catching up on a backlog of work, it can be much more complex for airlines.
Flight schedules, crew schedules and passengers’ connecting itineraries amount to an intricate and carefully-timed choreographed ballet of interconnected operations, and a disruption can leave all of the pieces of out of place. That makes it much more complicated to resume operations cleanly.
That means such disruptions pose huge tests for airlines’ recovery operations — which include crew scheduling and tracking.
An airline like Delta with operations in hundreds of cities around the world needs to track where crews are available to be able to staff flights, which becomes much more complicated when flight schedules are disrupted and crews are displaced.
With the outage having lasting effects on its crew tracking capabilities, Delta failed to adequately recover quickly after the outage and has struggled to return to normal operations in the days since.
Delta passenger David Fields experienced this firsthand and ended up stuck in Atlanta for days after his connecting flight was canceled and he tried to fly standby for multiple flights.
“Delta just kept canceling... flight after flight,” Fields said Saturday. Flights changed gates multiple times, forcing all of the passengers waiting in the gate area to move between concourses through the night, he said.
“We just ended up going all night, back and forth, for hours and hours and hours,” Fields said.
Well after midnight when Plane Train service is cut for its overnight operations, passengers including those pushing elderly people in wheelchairs had to walk between concourses, he said. Ultimately, without being able to get on any flight, Fields was rebooked for a flight three days later, and booked a hotel in Midtown Atlanta.
Massive multi-day operational meltdowns typically result in a financial hit amounting to tens of millions of dollars of impact to Delta, which typically reports such charges in its financial report after the quarter ends.
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