Delta Air Lines flight attendants say they are furious with CEO Ed Bastian’s decision to jet off to Paris with a bunch of other senior leaders for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday evening despite Delta’s much-publicized operational meltdown.
A spokesperson for the embattled airline confirmed that Bastian had flown to France on an all-expenses-paid trip as part of Delta’s multi-year sponsorship of Team USA but insisted that he only did so after he was confident the airline’s operational woes were close to being fixed.
In fact, Delta says Bastian was originally meant to head to Paris last weekend, but in the immediate aftermath of the global CrowdStrike IT outage, he wisely chose to postpone the trip.
Bastian stayed out of the public eye as Delta experienced a catastrophic and highly embarrassing operational meltdown but the airline insists that he was working with other senior leaders to get the mess fixed before he jumped on an international flight to cheer on American athletes.
By Wednesday, Delta had appeared to have got on the top of it problems and by Thursday, the Atlanta-based carrier started off the day with no published cancellations and very few delays.
That slice of good news, however, is little comfort to the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), which is attempting to unionize Delta’s inflight crewmembers.
The Delta AFA organizing committee slammed on Wednesday: “While management gave us baggies of laundry detergent in crew lounges, Ed and several board members traveled to Paris instead of being on the front lines leading us through this turmoil.”
“We’re fighting to secure our union so that in times of crisis, Ed can’t just jet off and leave us to fend for ourselves,” the union continued.
Of course, the Delta AFA organizing committee views this situation as yet another reason for Delta flight attendants to form a union, although even many crew members who aren’t interested in unionizing have expressed their frustration with how Bastian has handled this mess – and his decision to go to Paris.
Bastian, however, continues to lay low and apart from a few statements attributed to him, the long-serving CEO has remained remarkably media-shy throughout this fiasco.
Frontline workers would have liked to have seen Bastian and other senior leaders join them in airport concourses and gates, helping stranded passengers and talking to exhausted workers, even if it were for optics and PR.
Instead, Bastian went ahead with his trip to Paris, which marks Delta’s sponsorship of Team USA, which started in Beijing in 2022 and will continue all the way through to Los Angeles in 2028.
It remains to be seen whether that was a fatal error of judgement.
If Ed doesn’t stop this crap the FAs are going to end up voting in a union. As CFO, which he was when I worked there, he was good. As CEO, the power has gone to his head and his leadership skills are lacking, to put it mildly. When are the board of directors going to have enough and start looking elsewhere for Ed’s replacement? It’s no wonder excellent leaders like Gil West and others have left (Gil is now the CEO at Hertz). They probably had enough of Ed–although you’ll never hear them say that.
No ethics, no morals, no character, no nothing. Typical ceo. Servant leader? No ceo really is.
No, just no. I was working through the outage. He should have gone as he did. I am sick of all of the complaints. And yes, I had to sleep on an airplane and then on the floor. Was on duty with no hotel for 24 hours.
Talk to me after 72 hours of sleeping on the airport floor just waiting to get the help desk to arrange a flight out
How poorly the FAs seem to understand the role of CEO. Interfering with people doing their jobs for a photo op would not be a constructive use of his time.
This is all dumb stuff … Delta is the official airline of the PARIS OLYMPICS! If anybody in the world needed to be in Paris, it was Ed.
Anything for a story I guess……..