It's a familiar tale in the aviation industry. A black swan event hits all airlines causing massive flight cancellations. But as many begin to recover one airline emerges as a problem, unable to get it together to the detriment of its customers and employees.
It happened to Southwest during peak holiday travel time in December of 2022 when severe winter storms forced airlines to cancel droves of flights. But as the weather improved, thousands of Southwest planes remained grounded for an infamous 10 days even as just about every other airline was operating without major disruptions.
That debacle, a product of antiquated scheduling technology that made it more difficult for the airline to adjust its flight schedule and to have crews available to fly the rescheduled flights, cost the company close to $1 billion.
Now, in the wake of the CrowdStrike outage that began affecting major airlines on Friday, many across the globe that were initially prevented from flying had recovered and resumed normal operations by the end of the weekend. Not so for Delta Air Lines.
The Atlanta-based airline and its regional carrier (which feeds its system under the Delta Connection brand) collectively canceled nearly 500 flights on Tuesday as of mid-afternoon. That represented nearly 70% of all flights within, to or from the United States canceled for the day, according to FlightAware.
Believe it or not, this was an improvement from Monday's misery, when more than 1,250 flights were canceled on top of the 4,500 cancellations from Friday through Sunday between Delta and Delta connection.
Care to venture a guess as to what's preventing Delta from getting back to business as usual? Internal scheduling system issues are preventing the airline and its crew from communicating about everyone's whereabouts.
I mean, did Delta not learn anything from Southwest?
Reboots are never easy for airlines
When any piece of technology I own has a glitch, my instinct is to turn it off and on again. That simple act tends solve almost all the issues I have.
But for airlines, the system reboot that has to take place to coordinate new flights is not remotely simple, Kathleen Bangs, a FlightAware spokesperson, told CNN.
The greater the number of flight disruptions, the harder the reset, because it means more crew members are flooding the internal system at the same time to square away their next flights.
And it just so happened to be that the past weekend was the busiest travel weekend of the summer, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a recent note.
Southwest's meltdown also occurred during a peak travel period, days ahead of Christmas.
But it's not like Delta executives were sitting on the sidelines during Southwest's struggles thinking, "'Well we really are an amazing airline. Look at us coasting while they fall apart,'" Bangs said. "Every airline was probably checking their systems and looking at improvements they could make to their own IT."
Southwest was at a unique disadvantage in 2022 because of how outdated its tech was. Crew members voiced their concerns about it well before the meltdown, but they were largely ignored. Now that airline is taking a victory lap after its operations over the weekend were virtually unaffected.
"We've been consistently investing across the airline to modernize our core operation technology, bringing redundancies that helped us navigate around some vendors' temporary issues," Chris Perry, a Southwest spokesperson, told CNN.
In the case of Delta, Bangs said she'd be surprised to learn that its current situation is being exacerbated by outdated technology. But it remains a mystery as to why Delta's system is faring so much worse than its competitors. (The airline declined to respond to CNN's inquiry, instead directing it to recent company statements.)
Meanwhile, Delta's competitors aren't shying away from throwing shade.
"Folks, if you could please take your seat so we can keep the line moving. We want to get you out of here on time, unlike Delta!" one Reddit user reported a flight attendant announced on a non-Delta flight on Tuesday.
Bang's advice to them: "Be very careful, because it could be your turn in the barrel next."
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