Delta Air Lines has been a mess since Friday. CrowdStrike brought down systems all over the world, but other airlines recovered while Delta continues to be an operational disaster. Airline leadership is explaining internally what happened.
So far today Delta has cancelled more than 21% of its flights. 34% of its flights are delayed, so over half of the airline’s operations remain encumbered. Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air is still cancelling about 10% of flights. In contrast, American Airlines has so far cancelled 1% of flights today and United less than 1%.
The airline’s public statements have been little but finger pointing and self-congratulations despite the misery they’re putting both employees and customers through. It’s nearly as bad as Southwest was in December 2022, yet they aren’t getting the same level of recriminations and aren’t as generous with customers as Southwest was.
What it’s like out there:
My buddy is thereHe sent me this photosaid he’s 97% sure this lady just peed on floor while waiting 7 hours in line for customer service pic.twitter.com/m5NotJjjTK
— Alan K (@itsalankline) July 22, 2024
The big airlines were affected. Delta’s competitors recovered, Delta did not. They’re finally sharing details of what’s happened with their employees. Aviation watchdog JonNYC leaked a transcript.
CEO Ed Bastian begins by thanking employees for the toll this has taken on them. Remember, they are stranded like customers are. They also have to deal with customers. And Delta has cancelled more than twice as many flights since Friday as they did in all of 2019.
In the transcript, Bastian comes off as smug – blowing off Transportation Secretary Buttigieg’s imploring him to honor the airline’s obligations to customers: “I said,, you do not need to remind me, I know, because we do our very best, particularly in tough times taking care of customers.”
Bastian then concedes it is going to take days to recover from this still, “hopefully Tuesday and Wednesday will be that much better again and get ready for a real good weekend” even the cheerleading CEO would advise not to fly Delta this week.
Getting past the boilerplate, though, Bastian turned remarks over to the airline’s Chief Information Officer who started off saying ‘look, everybody uses CrowdStrike’ implying this is not their fault. But other airlines recovered, and Delta didn’t! Delta has a history of taking much longer to recover operations than peers, even though in normal times they operate somewhat more reliably.
They had to deal with “over 1,500…key systems…60% of our most critical applications that run the airline are Microsoft Windows-based, which means all of them were down”
But they got them back up in just “a few hours” in fact in time for 7:30 a.m. operations on Friday in Atlanta.
The problem is that their systems need to talk to each other, and the data transfer was completely overloaded. Most applications came back online, but the two key systems that continued to fail were “one that allows our Atlanta tower to really holistically manage our biggest hub in terms of gating arrivals, departures” (but that came back in a few hours) and “our crew tracking application.”
Delta couldn’t track crew or assign them to work flights.
someone says this is DL trying to locate it’s folks pic.twitter.com/WmZnSci2SH
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) July 22, 2024
Delta is literally announcing over the loud speaker “if there are any pilots that can fly xyz plane, please come to the front”
What the hell is going on?
— Multifamily Madness (@MultifamilyMad) July 22, 2024
Crew tracking has been running five parallel systems to catch up but “it’s a very dynamic environment.”
They haven’t known how to “resync” and “reset” to “bring synchronization between where you are and the schedule.” Southwest Airlines shut down their entire operation during Christmsa 2022, and rebuilt their schedules and assignments manually when their computers couldn’t do it (which is why they kept cancelling half their flights each day – it was too big of a task to accomplish manually with their staffing).
Their CIO expects Delta to “get to a better place by the end of the week.”
Here’s the full discussion:
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) July 22, 2024
Delta once said that only weather would ever cause Delta to cancel flights. One wonders whether the loss of their operations guru Gil West during the pandemic (now Hertz CEO), who said that, continues to have consequences and how much layoffs in IT this past fall may have come back to hurt them as well.