sbm12

The APU uses so little power that the planes can run for hours. Especially when not worrying about a 45 minute diversion minimum. I've yet to see any reports of any planes that lost power. I've seen plenty of reports of planes that had lavs pumped while waiting.

JSFox

What lessons are terrorists learning from this?

dinanm3atl

If all these details are true this is really eye opening. It's to the point of not being acceptable at all.

DenverBrian

An architecture issue, then. Still needs to be addressed for the future.

And the "but they use a LOT of power" argument shouldn't deter a focus on fail-safes and redundancies. Most everything related to 175,000 people a day uses a LOT of power.

Rabidstoat

They're under 2 hours until midnight on the East Coast, which is when the mayor said he expected the airport to be "fully operational." Wonder how close that'll be to reality.

RealHJ

No. ATL should have "A and B" power feeds, as is common and is commonly used in other critical or just important facilities.

Everyone else can do it - and almost everyone else does it. Only DL does not believe in that (look at the DL data center outage some months ago that resulted in major disruptions; that showed that DL not only doesn't have "A and B" power feeds, but that implied that DL doesn't even have the most basic UPS and generator protection, and/or that DL IT load are not set-up in the proper customary redundant fashion).

"A&B" power means two power distribution paths, fully redundant and diverse. (This means, not traveling in the same conduit or passing through the same switchboards, etc... physically separate, so if one has a catastrophic failure or event such as a fire, the other is uninterrupted.)

Sufficient generator capacity to run critical services (lights, doors, jetways, airline and CPB systems, etc.). When utility power is out, commercial services shut down (unless they have paid for/purchased the generator protected power). Airport operations continue uninterrupted.

That is the norm in any such operation. ATL/DL are outliers in not following the generally accepted norms, due to their continual cost cutting and refusal to invest sufficiently into the operations.

MrAndy1369

JSFox

At my former job our data centers had power entering from opposite ends of the building and these were fed from opposite grid systems. Half the facility always ran off of one power system, half off the other. There were two failover switches (one for each half of the facility) in two different locations so that either half of the facility could be switched to either grid supply or generators (which are apparently soon to be replaced by Tesla Powerpacks). IN THEORY, there was no single point of failure and the only way we'd loose power was a catastrophic grid failure AND failure of our own generators.

Oh, we also had a bunch of wall mounted emergency lights with their own batteries that were each tested every 3 months. Short of a bomb taking out our facility I'm quite sure these would have at least provided light for people to move around safely.

RealHJ

I wonder if the same "bright" mind "engineer" that designed the ATL airport electrical systems also designed the Georgia Power grid nearby.

Anyone even 1/4-competent will know that diverse, redundant systems need to have sufficient physical separation so that the worst case projection impact (that the design is supposed to guard against) on one part of it cannot impact the other. You don't put both the A and the B sources in or through the same Master Switch Board, for example.

og

Likewise, my toes curl when AA staff say "D for David" when trying to use the phonetic alphabet.

RealHJ

Delta is very dull and doesn't listen to its customers (or rather, has selective hearing and only hears what it wants to hear and filters out the rest) and is blissfully unaware of how it is doing in the real world operationally or of how its customers actually perceive it (good example of that is how Delta management has kept bragging about Delta being the "most reliable" airline operation endlessly, when statistically the Delta operations are seriously sub-par, with major meltdowns one not long after another, that with better planning and sufficient investment could have been at least minimized if not totally avoided; or the horribly broken reservations system where many flights couldn't be booked for several months online or by phone res agents, that DL just ignored and pretended wasn't so; serving practically inedible food in "Delta ONe", that crew and pax know about, yet DL won't listen and will keep serving it for weeks upon weeks; and so much more - the examples are close to endless).

CloneCones

Was supposed to fly tomorrow morning through ATL after the changes. Now I am DFW to LGA to RDU tomorrow afternoon. I won't be at my customer tomorrow at all but hopefully can be just fine on my Thursday flight back to DFW

milepig

ty97

Update from Delta.com as of 9:30pm ET: around 900 Delta flights canceled Sunday and (so far) 300 canceled for Monday.

UPDATED: Delta cancels some Monday flights due to ATL airport outage | Delta News Hub

And a CNN producer was on a DL plane that landed shortly after 1pm. This is a thread that she was posting ongoing (live) while she was on the plane. Sounds like a long ordeal for her and fellow passengers, but the passengers on this flight all seem to have handled it well considering.

landrover

DYKWIA! Bah