Widgets

Of course. 1000 corporate HQ employees volunteering at the airport, paying double overtime to anyone who wants it, and having literally anyone who knows how to use DLTerm picking up phones is all they can do on the staffing front. I have no call center training but I was tasked with receiving calls from ATL during all downtime at work this week. It's an all hands on deck situation at the moment. Even the executives are on the front line. On the operations side, keeping track of crew scheduling is a challenge. It's easy to brag about good customer service when ops are smooth.

appleguru

These last few days have been an absolute disaster for delta. This seems way worse than even the recent IT meltdowns.

avoiding hubs has proven to be the most reliable way to navigate this so far for us; crazy hold times and some persistence have paid off. But it has certainly been a long few days!

i don't understand how delta continues to cancel flights to/from hubs that are oversold by 10+ and expect this to get any better any time soon.

here was the scene at ATL Wednesday (all hotels sold out):


And this morning at DEN baggage (hundreds of bags, mostly from ATL and MSP, that presumably made it even though their owners did not):

minnyfly

Cancellations starting to pile up for tomorrow already. I'd avoid at least the entire weekend if you can. This is a historic operational collapse we're watching unfold.

KDCAflyer

Someone needs to make an album of all these photos and send it to a few media outlets.

Feel free to use my photos of DCA from Thursday morning.

spongenotbob

I actually think something else happened here that DL isn't disclosing. Nothing in the press indicates this was a "storm of the century". It was just a routine spring thunderstorm in Atlanta.

Something doesn't pass the smell test.

KDCAflyer

The storms were particularly bad, and shut ATL down for almost all of Wednesday. WX at other hubs didn't help either. Still, you're right, something seems off here. Storms are nothing new, and spring/summer comes every year.

apodo77

Delta gets an F this week.
hopefuily they learn from their mistakes.

Rossp1

You are confusing effort with results. The effort from DL employees is there. I have seen and heard it first hand. But the results arent. Cancellations are still continuing. DL employees can work 24 hours a day rebooking people, but if the planes dont fly, it wont matter. From an outside perspective it appears as though there has been no pre-planning for something like this, and also that the support infrastructure is severely limited.

Widgets

no, I agree with you. It's easy to brag when things go smooth. But when the .... hits the fan, silence. That's why bragging isn't good

jackal

I think the point at which the delay reason is logged as "crew delay" or "delayed inbound aircraft" is the point at which the blame shifts from being directly due to weather to being due to Delta's operational decisions. Once the delay reason is no longer "airport congestion" or "weather hold" or "ATC traffic," then everything else is something Delta has control over. (Unfortunately, Delta does not expose the internal reason for the flight delay, unlike UA, which lists it right on the flight status in the app or website, or like AS, who publishes that data to Sabre, which can then be retrieved with ExpertFlyer. But Delta employees can see it internally.)

It is entirely within Delta's power to hire and staff extra reserve crews and have them on hot standby both at hubs and at outstations. It's entirely within Delta's power to have extra aircraft available to fill in when other aircraft are out of place. It's entirely within Delta's power to change flight schedules and redirect aircraft through other hubs or bring aircraft from elsewhere in the route network to fill in the gaps created by the delayed/canceled flights. Heck, it's entirely and completely within Delta's ability and prerogative to scrap the entire idea of a hub-and-spoke network and operate their airline in a point-to-point fashion.

Delta of course does not do those things because those things are expensive. Paying extra crews and planes to sit around or to switch from a profitable hub-and-spoke model to a different model costs a lot of money. But the point is that those things are within Delta's control if Delta were willing to spend the money on them...so when those things that Delta has chosen to do (such as operate with bare minimum crews and push aircraft utilization to the max and place their entire network reliant on a few, massive fortress hubs like ATL and MSP) that negatively affect their network reliability but positively affect their bottom line then cause issues when the fit does hit the shan, my point is that Delta is then responsible for the decisions they've made and should be held accountable for those decisions and should then pay up when their customers start getting affected by those decisions.

Regardless of the above, though, I think that it is entirely fair to say that any crew/aircraft out-of-place delays occurring 24 or more hours after the end of the weather event that precipitated them should be considered independent of the weather event and thus compensated accordingly.

KDCAflyer

I mentioned previously that I rode on a shuttle full of DL pilots at DCA Wednesday night. They said that they had no idea when they were getting out the next day.

Sounds like there was a meltdown on the crew scheduling/communication side. It's bananas that a third of the DCA-ATL schedule was cancelled today.

appleguru

exactly. Employees I've gotten on the phone (after several hours of holding, even as a DM) have been doing everything in their power to accommodate. Problem is, all the flights are full. And even once rebooked on something viable, lots of these flights are being delayed and/or cancelled.

delays and cancellations due to crews timing out, mispositioned aircraft, etc are still stacking up. They are not out of this mess yet, not by a long shot!

KDCAflyer

I'm just floating this, but how problematic would it be for the FAA to consider loosening pilot timing rules during these sorts of situations? Could something like that be safely done?

DOT has similar measures for truck drivers, although a plane is obviously on an entirely different level.

Widgets

If this thread title should encompass the whole IROP situation, that 300 cancellation count should be multiplied by about 10 at this point

spongenotbob

No. If such a provision were made, suddenly every airline would be having "emergencies" every week to squeeze more time out of the pilots. There's already a huge, underappreciated problem with pilot fatigue out there.

Let's not....