Delta Air Lines entered its fourth straight day of mass cancellations and delays on Monday after CEO Ed Bastian admitted that the Atlanta-based carrier was struggling to track down its flight attendants and get them where they were needed to operate flights.
As of 7 a.m. ET on July 22, the embattled carrier had already canceled more than 615 flights, although many more cancellations are expected throughout the day, and delays could soon start racking up.
Unlike other US-based carriers, Delta has struggled to recover from the CrowdStrike update bug that caused a ‘blue screen of death’ on many Microsoft-enabled computers on Friday following a faulty software update.
Delta uses CrowdStrike and Microsoft Windows for a ‘significant’ number of its applications, and, crucially, the outage took a crew tracking tool offline.
Since then, Delta’s scheduling team have been unable to keep up with the ‘unprecedented’ number of changes caused by the outage and has lost track of where its flight attendants are.
Flight cancellations and delays have quickly piled up, with flight attendants out of position to operate flights, and the airline is seemingly unable to pair up available crewmembers with the planes they should be working on.
On Sunday, Delta closed the day with 1,380 cancellations according to data supplied by flight tracking website Flight Aware, and posted 1,605 delays – representing 78% of Delta’s daily schedule.
On Saturday, Delta canceled more than 1,200 flights and delayed 1,524 flights, while on the first day of the outage, the airline canceled a similar number of flights and delayed nearly 2,000 flights.
Bastian has now publicly apologized to the tens of thousands of passengers caught up in his airline’s operational meltdown and has promised to “restore the reliable, on-time experience you’ve come to expect when you fly with us.”
Delta’s ability to recover has been further hampered by the fact that the outage occurred as the airline entered its busiest travel weekend of the summer with booked loads exceeding 90%, meaning that the airline had little wiggle room to rebook affected passengers onto other flights.
The meltdown brings back memories of Southwest’s 2022 Christmas Holiday crisis when the airline also lost track of crewmembers during a period of severe weather.
In the end, Southwest was forced to drawback and reset its entire network in order to get planes and crewmembers back to where they were meant to be before restarting over again.
Delta has been melting down faster than a double scoop cone from California’s Death Valley Ice Cream Shop.
I wonder if Delta will get fined by the government like southwest did. The southwest meltdown didn’t even last as many days.