Atlanta
CNN
—
Bad news for passengers: Delta Air Lines canceled hundreds more flights early Tuesday morning as problems caused by last week’s global technical outage continued into a fifth day. Worse news: Delta’s meltdown will likely stretch to the end of the week.
By 2 p.m. ET, the Atlanta-based carrier had canceled 466 flights and Endeavor Air, its regional airline that feeds its system under the Delta Connection brand, had canceled another 28 flights. The cancellations follow more than 1,250 flight cancellations on Mondaysand 4,500 flights from Friday to Sunday between Delta and Delta connection.
There were more than 1,000 Delta and Delta Connection listed as delayed by FlightAware. The canceled flights by the two airlines represented nearly 70% of all flights within, to or from the United States that have been canceled on Monday, according to FlightAware. No other US airline had canceled a tenth as many flights.
The problems prompted Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to announce that the Department of Transportation would launch an investigation to ensure Delta follows the law and treats passengers fairly.
The DOT said it has received a “large volume of consumer complaints” about Delta’s actions since Friday. The department said that if can penalize an airline for “an unfair and deceptive practice” if it finds that an airline provided inadequate customer assistance when flights are canceled or travel plans are significantly changed.
Buttigieg asked passengers with complaints to contact the Department of Transportation.
“While you should first try to resolve issues directly with the airline, we want to hear from passengers who believe Delta has not followed USDOT-enforced passenger protection requirements during recent travel disruptions,” he tweeted. “We will follow up.”
Delta said it is cooperating with the investigation.
“We remain fully focused on restoring our business,” the company told CNN in a statement. “Across our operations, Delta teams are working tirelessly to care and make things right for customers affected by delays and cancellations as we work to restore the reliable, on-time service they’ve come to expect from Delta.”
The problems stemmed from a software update published late Thursday night by cyber security company CrowdStrike which crashed the Windows software. A cascading effect caused problems throughout the global airline industry on Friday.
While most airlines were able to recover and resume normal operations by the end of the weekend, Delta has not been able to fix problems with its crew tracking systemleaving it unable to find the pilots and flight attendants it needed to fly its planes.
The problems will continue for at least a few more days, warned Rahul Samant, the company’s chief information officer, in a message to Delta employees on Monday.
“So we’re optimistic that we’re going to get it done,” Samant said in the video message alongside CEO Ed Bastian. “There’s going to be some things that Ed said that we’re going to do today, tomorrow to get to a better place at the end of the week.” He said IT staff are working “feverishly” and “around the clock” to fix the problem.
Frustrated passengers and crews
The problems left tens of thousands of frustrated Delta customers stranded and unable to return home. Many of them booked other flights which were later canceled as well. The lack of hotel rooms forced many to sleep in airports and wait for hours trying to get to Delta in an often futile attempt to find a flight.
Delta crew members deal with similar frustrations. Many have been stranded at airports far from their bases and homes, unable to be placed on flights because Delta has been unable to locate crews and place them on planes. Some Delta crew members also cannot get hotel rooms and are sleeping in airports. And airport employees are grappling with angry, frustrated customers who don’t understand why their flights are being canceled when crew members are available.
Jeremy and Kaylee Jones were married on Saturday and left Spokane, Wash., on Monday for their honeymoon, they told CNN. Five guests were unable to attend the wedding due to flight problems.
They arrived in Atlanta early Tuesday morning for a connecting flight from Atlanta to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. There were no problems with the flights until they landed in Atlanta this morning and saw that the flight to St. Lucia was canceled due to lack of crew. The next Delta flight to St. Lucia isn’t until Friday, so they’re canceling their honeymoon.
The only other option is to be diverted to other airports, which they believe will have the same problem, and they still don’t have their luggage.
“Right now, I’m pretty pissed off,” Jeremy Jones said. “I understand things happen. This is just shocking to me that a multi-billion dollar company would fight so hard to get the ball rolling again.”
“I think the domino effect of canceled flights has people stuck here for 5 days. I have no confidence in getting anywhere at this point.”
This week, Delta remained in the dark about the whereabouts of its crew members. Crew members who logged into the company’s computer system to register for flights were prompted and asked questions that included: “Please enter below the airport code you are closest to,” “What is your current status?” and “Please describe your current location.”
A person familiar with the airline’s operations allowed CNN to see screenshots of the calls. Delta declined to comment on the questions it asked the crews.
To help solve its staffing problems, Delta is offering crew members premium pay, as well as additional assurances that they will be able to travel back to their homes at the end of their work period, according to the screenshots seen by CNN. The premium pay and insurance would be in place through Friday, another sign that the staffing issue may not be resolved for several more days. Delta also declined to comment on those offers to crew members.
But a letter from the president of Delta’s pilots union obtained by CNN said pilots once again faced the same “unacceptable hurdles” they typically face when the airline has a problem, namely “the inability to contact the company in any capacity and feeling that we have been abandoned in the system .”
Costing $163 million – and climbing
The service meltdown will cost Delta, both in terms of its reputation and in dollar costs. The meltdown has already cost the most profitable U.S. airline about $163 million through Monday, according to an estimate by Savanthi Syth, aviation analyst for Raymond James.
That estimate comes from lost revenue and is likely to rise when additional staff pay and customer reimbursements are added. Although the problems on Tuesday are not as severe as they had been in the last four days, the additional flight cancellations will add to these losses.
Delta has prided itself on its on-time performance and customer service. Earlier this month, they boasted in their performance report that it achieved the industry’s best completion factor and on-time performance, running 39 cancellation-free, absolutely perfect days. This meltdown is doing some reputational damage that will take time to repair.
After a similar service meltdown at Southwest Airlines during the 2022 year-end holiday season, the airline canceled nearly 17,000 flights, or about half its schedule, stranding more than 2 million passengers over a 10-day period. It cost them almost $1.2 billion between them fourth quarter of that year and that first two months of 2023. In addition customer compensationfaced the airline additional labor costs and lost revenue that continued into February. In addition, it was hit with $140 million in fines from the Department of Transportation.
Delta’s service black eye could also cause it to lose some future bookings from frustrated customers. This past weekend was the busiest travel period of the summer with 90% of seats booked. This has made it difficult for Delta to find other flights for customers whose flights have been canceled. Even if Delta operated all of its flights normally, it would take days to accommodate all of its angry, stranded passengers.
Rows and rows and rows of luggage
Reuniting these passengers with their checked baggage will take many more days on top of that.
United Airlines was also hit hard by the computer problem, with more than 1,000 flights canceled, although it was back to near-normal operations on Monday with only 69 flights canceled for its mainline. In a message to human resources chief Scott Kirby, the airline’s 26,000 computers affected by the problem had all been fixed and its operations had been normal for the past 24 hours. He said some passengers had not yet been reunited with their luggage, and United is using FedEx to deliver the bags to some of them.
At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Delta’s headquarters and largest hub, thousands of bags are lined up on the baggage claim floor. The bags made it to the world’s busiest airport, but due to delays and cancellations, their owners either didn’t arrive or arrived on a different plane.
Delta employees from all different departments and roles across the company complemented the efforts to help passengers making their way to Hartsfield find their bags.
Arthur Ginolfi, who had flown to Atlanta for a Global Business Travel Association convention after making two trips to the Philadelphia airport over the weekend, was among those who picked up a bag that had arrived on a different flight than his.
“This is the worst experience I’ve ever had in my 35 years of business travel,” he said. “There are lines that were unacceptable, there were people who were frustrated. I saw and heard many sad stories.”
He said he believes Delta needs to offer more compensation than he has received from the airline thus far.
“I had to pay for parking for 12 hours, I had to pay for food, I had to pay for tolls,” he said. “I deserve more pros than a $24 gift card.”
This story has been updated with additional context and developments.
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