Originally Posted by
deltaflyer7
Delta's flight scheduling / crew scheduling procedures need some work, obviously.
Did they run out of reserve pilots more rapidly than the other carriers?
Was their crew scheduling system inaccessible for just long enough that they really did lose track of crew locations and hours flown?
I don't buy that, they have a whole "crew scheduling" department whose job it is to know these things. They have telephones.
Delta of 2005 apparently used spreadsheets augmented with other automation to build their master schedule, but I only saw a bit of this process from the vantage point of a regional airline that was a Delta partner. If Delta hasn't change that tech in the last 20 years, then I can believe their schedule is more fragile than other airlines.
DOT needs to do a deep dive into Delta to see why things took so long to recover, and put investigators INSIDE the IT department.
Interview everybody.
A lot needs to be figured out, but one problem all the airlines face in these mass cancellation scenarios is that their displaced or needed crew members, cabin and flight deck, still need operational flights to be in service in order to deadhead. If everything is cancelled how do you relocate your crews? In this case it will possibly also require displacing paying passengers, who will, of course, not be pleased at that. Duty time limits also come into play in many cases as well, as in the crew arrived but now they can’t work until a rest period. It’s all intertwined and can be quite messy.