OK, so I'm heading on the rental car shuttle at RDU to fly back to ATL on FRONTIER and a guy tells the driver his airline is Delta and a woman says, "Ooooh, didn't you hear? They had a massive outage and their flights are delayed all over the place."

The guy was kinda surprised he hadn't been called or anything, but he gets on his smartphone and finds his flight with a posted delay of just an hour or so, which he hope holds.

I get to the terminal and see the line at the ticket counter, which looks about 200 deep and like a disastrous TSA line. The Skiority one is maybe 30 deep. But this is only RDU, a relatively minor airport for them in the overall scheme of things. I look at the big board, though, and it's full of DL delays and a cancellation or two.

As "luck" would have it, one of the DL gates was right next to my Frontier gate. Looked like a line of about 50 or so there. The gate agent on the loudspeaker was trying to hand out red cards and get people to rebook for the next day or request a refund, but people were still holding out hope it wouldn't be that long. They were only encouraging those with ATL as a final destination to play the waiting game to try to get on something that day, as it could be that the connection was stuck and they'd just have to wait in ATL rather than RDU in that case.

The gate agent apologized, said she knew it was stressful, said the problem was systemwide, and that she'd been at the airport since 3:30 a.m. (It was around 12:30 p.m. by then).

It looked like a worse problem than might be indicated by that guy's hour delay, so I decided that that was just the opening bid and they were doing that time-honored airline tradition of dribbling out the bad news in little bites.

My plane with Frontier ($38 RT from ATL!) was on time. I got on as zone 1 (as a relatively new elite) for my window seat in one of the "stretch" seats up front with the free carry-on bag...more or less the standard treatment for legacies. The middle seat was unoccupied. The plane as a whole was at maybe 85%. Delta mustn't have an interline agreement, because many of their distressed pax were headed to ATL and they could have easily filled that plane. I dunno what Frontier wanted on the walk-up, but there may have been one or two that just paid it out-of-pocket.

As a former plat who's taken only one paid DL flight since they shifted to the revenue model, I have to admit to a small, small, tiny bit of schadenfreude over the whole thing, not for the poor pax (who at least in RDU were taking it well) but for the airline. Also realizing that Frontier is probably 5 times as hackable and can't get its website to function as intended in some browsers under NORMAL circumstances. And would likely be terrible in irregular operations, though probably not *quite* as bad as Spirit (F9 might get you a can of Sprite while you sleep on the floor).

Oh, and F9 still has the distance-based miles. ^ Got 1,000 where the same ticket on DL would have earned 190 (Oh, wait, more like 45 if you don't earn miles on the part paid for taxes). A thousand vs. 45...no wonder the rental cars have been earning the most legacy miles for me lately.

BTW, this should be a wake-up call in that a failure like this at any of the 3 legacies (power outage, Russian hackers, disgruntled employee sabotage or any other possibility) can't or won't be absorbed by the rest of the system. It reminds me of the UPS strike of years ago where the USPS and FedEx didn't have capacity to pick up the slack.

Thanks to these MERGERS and having just three major airlines, the pax get treated worse, the FF programs have been greatly devalued for the vast majority of pax, and if any one goes down then the rest of the system might not be able to help out that much - or at least there's not a good plan.

I do hope that guy doesn't have to stay in the airport overnight. Wasn't his fault.