No one on this board, except for an employee who can look up load information actually knows what really happened. But, we have plenty of data points to make some assumptions based on the conditions of the Delta operation earlier this week.

I can assume that DL isn't lying and they flew some private jets where they said they did in the article.

I can assume that they probably don't care for Ma and Pa Kettle enough to give them a ride in a private jet. However, they do care about their HVCs enough to do that.

I can assume that the planes that went out to those same locations as the private jets had a 100% load factor on the day they sent the private jets out due to a myriad of cancellations and a backlog of passengers waiting to go to where they needed to go.

I can assume that those people who were on the private jets would be higher up on the standby/rebooking priority list than the average passenger.

Based on all those relatively safe assumptions, I can deduce that those seats that would have been used by those who took a private jet instead went to other displaced passengers.