Some people have important meetings or job interviews.

FWIW, channel 2 in Atlanta led with the Delta story at 6, and their chief engineer showed their reporter what one of the switchgears looked like (as TV stations have them as well, as well as backup generators in case of a power failure). Their engineer said a failure at a place like Delta would be a big deal.

The RDU situation I saw around 12:30 p.m. probably happened quite a bit, i.e. they were trying to get people to rebook for the next day but people didn't want to throw in the towel just yet. The certain $200 voucher wouldn't be enough to sway 'em.

Maybe a missed cruise or two out there as well.

Of course. Most people only fly because they need to be someplace else. But am I crazy for thinking that DL gets a little bit of a pass for this very rare and exceptional event? I am by no means a DL apologist--I want them to take care of their customers. But I just think that sometimes **** happens, and that when it comes to travel, most people understand that--including people who are expecting others to show up at "important meetings or job interviews" who are unable to make it. From what I can tell, DL is doing what need to do to get things back in order, including waiving all change fees and being flexible with rebooking. How much do you think they should be paying?

I'd start by seeing how many MSP-AMS flights have been cancelled and how many of the obvious alternatives, such as MSP-CDG or DTW-AMS, have also been cancelled. Check for today, tomorrow, and Wednesday. You can also experiment with some dummy bookings to see whether DL is selling tickets on this route and roughly how much inventory in each fare class. EF does this well, but you can also get a lot of the same information from delta.dumb with some pain.

Check the DL CoC for their policies about priorities for IDBs and downgrades. Check the EC261 rules too. Tell them to do OLCI if possible and get to the airport early.

International flights are somewhat more likely, when necessary, just to do IDBs and invol downgrades rather than asking for volunteers, but they might want to think about the amount at which they would be willing/happy to take a VDB or downgrade. You should also look at alternatives for them and give them some "Plan B" flight numbers, routes and times to feed to GAs if needed.

Part of the pitch the harried gate agent in RDU was trying to make was that if you waited & hoped rather than taking the rebooking the next day, you wouldn't be able to get on the early flights because the seats would be taken. She wasn't getting many takers at 12:30 p.m. as long as there was a slim chance of getting out that day, but maybe the sentiment changed as the day wore on.

It definitely seemed like a dribbling cascade of bad departure-time news. The first estimate is just the opening bid.

I suspect that Tokyo hotels were pretty full for tonight. I know that every Starwood in the greater Tokyo area is completely booked.

Let's not forget that it's a logistical mess to send a couple people to each hotel in the area that might have a couple rooms available, especially if most of the transportation options from NRT have already ceased operations for the night.

Still, I'm a bit surprised that the DL folks at NRT didn't manage to arrange hotels for D1 passengers and high tier elites even if they couldn't do this for everyone.

It will be the deductible on their business interruption insurance. Who knows but I would suspect in the $XM range.

SABRE is one of the biggest mainframe shops in TX...

Facebook and Twitter can architect their applications in different ways because their business demands are different. Facebook is fine with you not seeing your buddies update for a few minutes because global DNS load balancing sent you different DC and their change hasn't replicated there. Eventual consistency is fine.

Some business requirements are aligned with cloud native application design, and some aren't.

Banking and airline applications are sequential transactions that require immediate consistency. Immediate consistency requires a single source of truth at the data persistence layer. One DB that you read and write from. Milliseconds matter. If you used the type of data persistence layers that lead to cloud native applications that can survive an entire DC going down you aren't recording sequential transactions. There is a single ticket in K bucket, I can't sell it to two people because they connected to different datacenters. There is one seat 16a, I can't assign it to two people because they connected to different data centers.

You can replicate the data persistence layer, but it is going to take time to fail over. I'm sure DL replicates the SAN under their mainframes and X86 servers, but it takes time to fail over. You have to make the decision to failover or wait it out based on how long you thing the outage will take.

If it makes you feel any better, this could describe pretty much any busy day at LAX. Last time I went through there, they declared a full ground stop just because they lost control of the volume of incoming traffic due to delays caused by eastern US thunderstorms.

While there are some awesome long time DL employees at LAX who are saints, there are also some extremely confused new hires who I am summarily unimpressed with - if the point and click interface can't do it or the slightest modicum of creativity is required, they need to call in a red coat. And that can be an exercise in surliness depending on who answers the call, too.

A few months ago, communication was so bad at the gate that the captain for my flight rolled his eyes and took command of the situation, picking up a microphone and actually announcing what was happening for once...

^

I'd agree with many of your statements except that there are 1000's of busineses today that are performing the same logic on vastly superior systems. The idea of single state is NOT new or even airline centric. You're got to be kidding yourself if you think the airline industry is THAT unique. This isn't new or ground braking.

Want an example in the airline industry? How do GDS's some distribute inventory and fare invormation with any (that I know of) interruption in many many years?

Distriubuted mainframes. It's possible. Let's stop this idea of delta is smarter than IT. they aren't. It's proven. They need better people (no more dissimilar than IT organization when this happens).

Award redeposit
 

Anyone know if that waiver will cover any mileage redeposit fee if I have an award ticket booked tomorrow the 9th? Any input is greatly appreciated. I am on hold with DL now

Don't see why it wouldn't. You should be fine.

Yeah, every time I passed through LAX, I always got a negative vibe there from DL agents. Not sure why, but it's always been a cesspool of negativity and gloominess from DL staff.